The provisions of the Americans with Disability Act (ADA) require that places of public accommodation, including websites, make themselves accessible to people with disabilities. Yet ADA website compliance is not only good policy from a legal standpoint; it also makes sense financially. This article covers 4 ways an ADA website compliance service can help drive significant savings for your business in the long run.
These include:
- Reducing legal fees by helping your site avoid accessibility lawsuits
- Saving on marketing costs by enabling your site to appeal to a broader audience
- Improving site design, boosting user loyalty and engagement and cutting marketing costs
- Saving on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) spending by bolstering your SEO efforts
Reduce Legal Costs
Lawsuits brought against websites that aren’t accessible to people with disabilities have been on the upswing lately. Since the landmark lawsuit brought against Winn-Dixie by a blind man who claimed that the company’s website was in violation of the ADA, many more lawsuits have followed.
In excess of 2,000 lawsuits against websites for ADA compliance issues were reportedly filled in 2018, substantially more than the prior year. To complicate matters further for website owners, even gaining dismissal of an accessibility lawsuit against a site doesn’t remedy the tens of thousands in legal fees that achieving a dismissal might cost.
Using an ADA website compliance service to bring your site into compliance with the ADA can pay big dividends over the long-term by sharply reducing the likelihood that you will be sued for having a non-accessible site.
Save on Marketing Costs by Broadening Your Site’s Appeal
Failing to make your site accessible to people with disabilities can reduce your ability to do business with a customer group estimated to be more than 50 million strong in the U.S., according to the United States Census Bureau.
By hiring a website accessibility service, you can rapidly broaden the scope of your site’s addressable audience – an audience that holds billions in spending power.
The costs to reach such a huge audience using traditional marketing methods, whether through digital or analog methods, would be substantial, especially on an ongoing basis.
Using an ADA website compliance service, however, can generate substantial savings by drastically increasing the size of your potential customer base.
Improve Site Design, Boosting User Loyalty and Engagement and Cutting Marketing Costs
The WCAG 2.0 guidelines, the standards most commonly utilized to guide accessible website design, are widely considered to be effective for improving overall website usability and design.
These guidelines can do more than simply make your site accessible to people with disabilities.
Because they are based on principles of good design, they can also make your site appealing and easy to navigate for all of your visitors. This means that business you might have otherwise lost due to poor site design or functionality can now be retained.
This improved site design can save you significant sums that you would otherwise spend on marketing for visits and engagement on your website. Over time – from an efficiency standpoint – the savings from improving your site’s design are substantial.
Save on SEO Costs by Bolstering Your SEO Efforts
SEO bots from Google and other search engines have been said to search websites by crawling through them similarly to the manner in which a person with disabilities would. As a result, the changes necessary to make your website compliant with the ADA can also make it easier for search engine bots to evaluate your site for SEO purposes.
A search engine bot can’t view your pictures, So, like an individual with visual disabilities, it relies on your alt tags describing the image. A search engine also can’t listen to the audio associated with video content on your site, so it also relies on written descriptions or transcripts of the material – similar to those with disabilities.
Major search engines such as Google have made it clear that user-friendliness and intuitive site navigation play a part in determining a site’s position in the SERPs (search engine results page) – the position your page will get after a search offers it up as a result.
Boosting your SEO in this manner can generate significant savings over the long run in funds that you would otherwise spend on SEO efforts.
Start Your Website Compliance Check
Not sure how to make your website ADA compliant? Download our Essential Web Accessibility Guide to walk through what makes a website compliant and learn how yours stacks up.
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