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ADA Website Accessibility

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Digital accessibility and compliance is something that you need to consider for your B2B website. An ADA compliant website ensures that your business is more readily accessed by other businesses. Though at the heart of it lies the idea of equal opportunity and equal access for all, it also ensures that your business cuts across boundaries and reaches all. It is important for your B2B website to offer quality content and it needs to be accessible. When other businesses can easily gather important information on your offerings, you are sure to increase your sales and scale new heights.

 

B2B Website Accessibility Checklist
There are critical required features for B2B websites. Regardless if users on your site are existing or potential customers, these features should be accessible where applicable.

  • Access page content and blogs
  • Email marketing integration
  • Contact forms
  • Business/Office Locator
  • Videos
  • Images
  • Flexible checkout process
  • Customer registration
  • Site search
  • Navigation

 

B2B Website ADA Compliance Lawsuits
B2B companies provide an array of services beyond their offering. A moving company doesn’t just move office furniture to a new office, they could also provide special deals on their website, email promotions, and a means for a customer to get in contact with a moving professional. A business service’s website should host plenty of valuable, quality content such as blogs, services pages, videos, and images as well as provide forms to capture contact information to contact prospects.

A 2010 U.S. Census Bureau report approximated 8.1 million people in the United States are visually impaired, including 2 million who are blind, and is expected to have increased since. A user that is visually impaired or legally blind requires the assistance of screenreading software to read website content. In the wave of technological advances in recent years, assistive computer technology is an increasingly prominent part of everyday life. You need your website to be accessible to your client or their employees who may have a disability. Doing so allows blind and visually impaired persons to fully and independently access a variety of business services.

Under the Americans with Disabilities Act, businesses cannot deny persons with a disability equal access to goods and services provided by the business as they would to persons without a disability. Customers can bring a civil rights action, or file a federal lawsuit against a business service for their failure to design, construct, maintain, and operate their website to be fully accessible to and independently usable.

Business service websites can contain thousands of access barriers that make it difficult if not impossible for customers who are blind and visually-impaired to use the business’s website. This excludes users with a disability from the full and equal participation in the growing Internet economy that is an increasingly common part of daily living.

There is readily available accessible technologies that heavily trafficked business service websites use, such as alternative text, accessible forms, descriptive links, resizable text and limits the usage of tables and JavaScript. When a business decides to use an exclusively visual interface, persons who are blind or visually impaired need to rely on sighted companions to assist them. A business failing to make their business service website accessible to blind persons violates basic equal access requirements under both state and federal law.

 

Check out these B2B lawsuits: