Why Automation Alone Can’t Make Your Website Accessible And Legally Compliant
The web accessibility lawsuits have widely increased over the past 5 years. It is nowadays paramount for small businesses to prevent any potential litigation down the road by achieving compliance with ADA (USA) WCAG 2.1 internationally and other frameworks according to the business region location.
The process is challenging mainly for one essential reason– making a website legitimately certified and easily accessible, specifically if consistent revamping is needed, requires substantial time and money.
For smaller-sized organizations, particularly, such resources are not constantly readily available and for this reason, the threat of neglecting certain customers and therefore impending legal action looms close.
Enter the AI or automation-based companies, several of whom claim that with a rather affordable rate and the injection of one line of code, a site can be made easily accessible through automated monitoring, assessing as well as removal procedures that work in the background.
The advertising and marketing hype is alluring. For a convenient fee, website owners can outsource their availability compliance to a cost-effective AI option and also feel safe, relying on the understanding that they are protected from lawsuits, without losing beneficial customers.
Regrettably, all that glitters is not gold. Though the fundamental pretense is on the nose, i.e. there’s an alarming need of more affordable, scalable products and services— AI or overlays solutions are plain deceiving services and definitely not the magic bullet they are often pretending to be.
If any doubt remains over whether a simple overlay or AI (automated) solution can shiled a website from lawsuits, one doesn’t need to look any further than the recent case against eyewear retailer eyebobs.
Only a few months ago, a federal judge approved a class action settlement against the company brought forward by a visually impaired plaintiff.
This occurred although eyebobs had been deploying a market-leading internet accessibility AI overlay solution on their website.
Eyebobs is not the initial company to get filed a claim against in spite of having deployed such a tool and is unlikely to be the last.
Adding an accessibility widget to your website will certainly not remove access barriers for all people with handicaps.
The scope, as well as depth of this settlement, shows a substantial trend highlighting what we, at DesignDiverso, have actually known for a long period of time. Proving web accessibility, is continuous process that requires manual work, assessing and testing, and not some kind of widget.
Being Transparent
As providers of web accessibility services DesignDiverso, implements hand-operated testing and also remediation service to better serve our partners and fill the gaps.
We’ve been in the web accessibility area for a few years now, we’ve created websites, software and design systems to ensure small businesses’ compliance with the main global standards at an extremely affordable rate included with our basic solution plans.
We’ve recently introduced our WEdiverso program which is meant for compensating our team of website testers with actual impairments.
At DesignDiverso, Tancredi Leone believes that resolving several of the complications with small business websites over whether they are doing enough to guarantee their digital products are accessible by everyone and legally compliant depends greatly on software developers and designers.
Our bedrock for transparency is proving our partners with a solution that is constantly updated and integrated to meet the latest and ever-evolving critical changes in web technology.
With DesignDiverso solution our partners can truly rely on a team that works incessantly to ensure the required compliances for web accessibility.
Compliance with WCAG helps protect brands from litigation
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), and numerous international accessibility laws are based on the WCAG framework. By focusing on four principles of accessible design — perceivability, operability, understandability, and robustness — WCAG provides webmasters with crucial guidance for creating better content.
For U.S. businesses, compliance with WCAG is voluntary, but conformance with the ADA isn’t optional.
Meeting the standards of WCAG 2.1 Level AA shows a strong commitment to digital accessibility.
More importantly, WCAG conformance ensures that every web user enjoys a better experience: Accessible websites attract more visitors, perform better in search engine rankings, and spend fewer resources on website maintenance.
