So when you think of using the internet, you probably don’t think about how you will use a website. If you can see, hear, and move your mouse around then, you will click on buttons and use the website interface. But what happens if you have a disability; where you cannot hear, or you are visually impaired? Maybe you have mobility impairments that make it hard to move a mouse or click on a link. The least understood impairment might be cognitive impairments, like ADHD, Dyslexia, or Epilepsy. That is where ADA plugins can come in to help in your web development. We will look at the UserWay plugin and see how it can help us meet the ADA and WCAG requirements to make our websites compatible and user-friendly for everyone.
To build a site to meet these requirements would be pretty tricky. The level of changes that need to be made would cause the site to load extremely slow and would not appeal to most people. So what are some of the changes that UserWay will make to your site? First, they will add a small icon in any corner of your site to make it easy to click on. Second, you will click on the UserWay icon you will be given a menu to select from. This allows the visitor to choose the items they need to view your site.
Allowing a visitor to adjust the contrast of your site or use different colors will help them read and navigate your site will be extremely useful but not something you can do with just HTML. Some sites struggle with poor functionality or chaotic structure of pages and posts. There is really no specific way to build a website. It’s not like a book where you open the cover, read left to right, and turn the page. With websites, you might navigate with images or buttons; you may click on banners or links in a menu at the top of the page.
UserWay works with web accessibility standards to meet the standards of WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines), and to keep your site current with these guidelines.
The guidelines are broken down into three levels:
- Level A — This is the lowest level and includes relatively easy enhancements to make. This level represents the bare minimum of accessibility.
- Level AA — This is the intermediate level and contains enhancements that are more difficult to implement but also increase accessibility.
- Level AAA — This is the highest level of standards, and they are the most difficult to meet. However, they do yield the greatest accessibility for end-users.
To be honest, there is a lot going on to meet these standards, and they change all the time. I have found UserWay to be the easiest way to bring your website to a standard that allows a person with disabilities the ability to navigate around your site, to use it to its fullest without excluding them from content or deals that you may be running on your site.
The most significant benefit for the web designer is to use UserWay’s pro version. They are using an AI system that will basically go through your site and make these adjustments and help make things easier, better, and faster at meeting the standards. Now, as the standards update so does the UserWay plugin, all in the background.
On the legal side of things. There are cases of lawsuits, so one thing you want to try to do is to stay away from the chance that someone will come to your site, find it not accessible, and want to sue. To avoid legal mitigation, let that person understand that you are trying to make your site user-friendly and that you are willing to make changes. If you are asked to make changes working with UserWay will make the process much easier to navigate, they’re able to help you out if you are ever addressed with a violation and then have to serve a complaint or a lawsuit. UserWay Ensuring your site is fully compliant protects your business from accessibility-related lawsuits.
