Today’s world is slowly but surely becoming more in tune with the needs of those with disabilities. Web design is no different. As a business owner, you want your store or workplace to be easily visited by people with physical or mental disabilities. Your website should be no different.
We can help! Introducing Dogwood’s fully automated web accessibility solution for ADA & WCAG compliance.
What is Web Accessibility?
To the average person, navigating the internet gives no problems except for the occasional loading error or dysfunction on a site. You can usually find the website you need, read a minute, and find your answers. Imagine now if you had low vision problems and could not read the small text or if the bright flashing of images from a site could potentially trigger a seizure for you? What if your attention deficit disorder made it very difficult for you to find your answers among all the information that sites normally aim towards us? What if you were color blind? Your visits to certain sites would be short-lived if not impossible. Web Accessibility means making sure that your website is as easily navigated by those with disabilities as it is by those without disabilities.
The Digital Divide
More than 56 million people in the U.S. live with a disability. This disability often makes it difficult for them to use technology. While we happily comply with wheelchair ramps and other measures to allow handicapped customers into our store or workplace, we don’t often think about the effect disabilities can have on those who visit our website. So how do business owners close this digital divide?
The answer is making sure that the internet is able to be used by everyone. While you cannot control the entire internet, you can make sure your website is accessible. With Dogwood’s help, this can be done easily and with no major changes to the current look or feel of your site. We believe so strongly that the internet is for everyone we have made sure that our own site is easily accessed by anyone and everyone. Let’s take a look at what we have implemented with our site. We can easily add this function to your site too.
What Does Web Accessibility Look Like?
If you notice on any of our website pages there is a small green circle with the outline of a person on the bottom left corner. It looks like this if you missed it:
When you click on that green circle you open up our accessibility menu. This is what it would look like on your page also. We can customize the color palette to complement your website colors also. You will see from the below screenshots that the menu offers changes that would help those with disabilities navigate your site much easier.
Accessibility Profiles allow the user to choose what would help them the most.
Users can adjust content details so they navigate the site more easily. Orientation adjustments can be made also in another section.
Color adjustments can be made easily here.
None of these changes affect the foundation of your site permanently but instead change based on the input of the current user. Your site will not crash or be damaged because of the accessibility menu and any other visitors not using the menu will see what your site traditionally looks like. Play around with our options on the site yourself and see what they do.
Website Compliance
Just as physical places of work and businesses have compliance standards they must meet for those with disabilities or face a fine (or worse a lawsuit) the world wide web has compliance standards also. Regulatory agencies are working to make sure that the internet is available to everyone. There is a possibility that if your website is not compliant that you could be subject to a lawsuit. Read about ADA and WCAG compliance standards and recommendations for yourself. The good news is that we can help! If faced with legal issues regarding accessibility we can remedy that by adding the accessibility feature to your site. If you have the accessibility feature in place and are then faced with a lawsuit, the feature will show that you are in fact accessible.
The cost to add accessibility to your site is very economical. There is a base rate per year and then the price is calculated by the size of your site. We want to help you broaden your customer base through accessibility and protect your business from legal action. Adding web accessibility solutions with Dogwood will open your website to the world. Ready to take action? Let’s start a conversation!
