ADA Compliance

We're going to talk about ADA compliance and how ResNexus can help you stay ADA friendly online.

What is ADA Compliance?

ADA compliance has been a buzzword in the industry for quite a while. ADA stands for the American with Disabilities Act, and it's a civil rights law that was enacted in the early 1990s to protect individuals with disabilities from discrimination.

In 2010, ADA was updated to include website accessibility, which is mainly what we're going to be talking about today.

In recent years, they've added new requirements for websites and online content as well, so I'm going to cover a bit of that today as well.

How does ADA compliance affect my business?

The law applies to many aspects of your business, some of which are building codes for renovations, parking, employment and your website.

The Wall Street Journal reported on February 17, 2019 that many businesses are being hit with lawsuits regarding their websites not being ADA compliant. It went on to report that "the number of website access lawsuits filed in federal court reached 2,250 in 2018, almost three times the 814 that were filed in 2017."

Most of the lawsuits have been filed in Florida and California. The majority of complaints revolve around visibility for visibility impaied people who are unable to read the website details out loud. In 2010, the U.S. Department of Justice said that it would create website access guidelines, and then delayed the rulemaking; it has yet to make any definitive rules on that.

The clearest set of guidelines from the DOJ came in an August 2016 case, in which the DOJ ruled that the University of California, Berkeley should use WCAG or web content accessibility guidelines as the standard for accessibility.

Currently, all government websites are required to follow the WCAG AA requirements.

As of February 2019, there aren't any official set of requirements for non-government websites from Congress or the DOJ. So ADA is a little left to interpretation based on that.

What are the WCAG AA Guidelines?

• Perceivable content - not invisible to all senses
• Operable content and interface - interface can't require interaction that a user can't perform
• Understandable - users must be able to understand the information as well as a required operation from the user
• Robust - content must be robust enough that it can be interpreted reliably from a wide variety of user agents, including assistive technologies

How does ResNexus help my business with ADA compliance?

As accessibility issues are reported, the website team works to resolve all of them at no extra charge. We currently have the Chrome accessibility audit, the WAVE extension audit and the WebAIM contrast checker all passing the WCAG AA level of compliance on every page built using the ResNexus website builder.

The ResNexus website team actively checks for and passes an ADA compliance audit while building new websites. In addition, we actively develop fixes for any other issues that we find on our own or that get reported to us by our clients.

What are some of the most common website issues to fix?

• Alternate text for images
• Empty text field
• Color Contrast

What about the booking engine?

ResNexus also checks for ADA compliance on your booking engine. Recently, the ResNexus booking engine has been updated to make it easier to shop only using a keyboard. That is what our calendar update was all about. We changed that recently; it's about making it easier for those keyboard accessibility people to access our calendar.

In the last half of 2018, the development team did a full review of all the pages on the booking engine and fixed all of the issues that they were able to discover, without charging any additional fees. The support team also reviewed customized colors to ensure that they're ADA friendly and have enough of a color contrast.

We also added an accessibility tool widget into the top right hand corner that you can enable. When guests click on it, it will bring down a menu for someone with a disability to use.

How do I check the ADA compliance of my website and my booking engine?

We have an awesome tool on ResNexus that can help you check on your ADA compliance: our ADA checker. You can access this in the back end of your website.

Or if your website or booking engine is already published, you can right click on the live website's page, click "Inspect" and click on "Lighthouse" on the top menu (you may have to click the double arrows to find it). Choose between "mobile" and "desktop" and make sure "Accessibility" is selected. Then click "Run Audit."

Lighthouse will check everything on the current page you're on to see if it is ADA friendly. You should try to get the highest score possible, which is 100%. Make sure you go on every page to check if it's ADA friendly.

In Conclusion

To reduce the chance of a lawsuit, use our ADA checker and Lighthouse to make sure your website and booking engine are ADA friendly.