Key Benefits of ADA Compliance for Your Business

Increased Inclusivity & Accessibility

The best benefit for your business when your website becomes ADA compliant is knowing you are doing the right thing, both for your audience and for your business. Providing equal access and opportunity to your website and business is not only the right thing to do in terms of equity and inclusion, but it’s a smart decision for website performance and reaching a wider audience.

Expand Your Services & Products to a Significant Portion of the Population

If your website is not already ADA compliant, you are automatically missing out on millions of potential customers or clients who cannot reasonably access your website due their disabilities. According to the CDC, 25 percent of the population, or approximately 61 million individuals, live with some form of disability.

That is a significant segment of the population. If your website is not compliant, they may arrive at your website unable to navigate or access your services—all because your website is only accessible to people without disabilities. As a result, these individuals would have good reason to move on to your competitor. Providing reasonable website accessibility options allows more of the population to easily explore your brand, buy your products, or use your services much more efficiently and effectively.

Enhanced Usability & User Experience

Creating a more operable, navigable website ultimately benefits all users. Ensuring that your web pages are easy to comprehend allows everyone, disabled or not, to find what they are looking for quickly. More often than not, people will leave a website that is difficult to navigate and understand, even if they are interested in that business. As a result, ADA Compliance helps your business guide more people through your sales funnel and convert quality leads. Not to mention, using a website that focuses on ease of use leaves a positive first impression.

Build a Positive Brand Reputation

Providing unimpeded access to an audience who is often forced to advocate for themselves will resonate well with your target audience and those living with some form of disability. Simply put, the modern consumer prefers to do business with socially responsible brands. By taking a proactive approach with ADA Compliance, businesses show that they are strong advocates for equal opportunity and equal access.

Not to mention, consumers take heart knowing that they are dealing with a business that cares about them and sees them as valuable. This builds trust with consumers and creates a positive brand reputation. As a result, ensuring your website is ADA compliant not only shows that you care about your customers or clients beyond their business with your company, but it is also a great opportunity to get some positive press for your brand.

Enrich SEO Efforts

ADA-compliant content provides a direct benefit to SEO. Image descriptions, video captions, and other forms of descriptive texts that enable disabled users to use your website actually overlap with SEO efforts by providing more text-based content for search engines and screen readers to “crawl,” ultimately improving your SEO performance.

Now more than ever, search engines are evolving to “crawl” website pages with more intention. Screen readers, a key element of Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), will crawl websites just like search engines. As a result, websites that meet WCAG guidelines are more likely to be found by more users, search engines, and screen readers.

A key element of WCAG is accessibility to screen readers, and these reader will crawl your website pages just like a search engine. If your website meets Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), it will likely appeal to more users, search engines, and screen readers, ultimately improving your SEO efforts.

Mitigate Legal Action

In most cases of noncompliance, it is completely unintentional. Even though website owners aren’t intentionally ignoring these standards, they will be held completely liable. Every website owner is solely responsible for developing a website that offers “reasonable accessibility.” Regardless of who builds and develops the website, it is the website owner that is responsible for implementing the accessibility standards and personally liable for noncompliance.

Failure to meet ADA Compliance can result in lawsuits, legal fees, hefty fines, potential settlements, public relations problems, and damage to your brand reputation. First-time violations can result in fines from $55,000-$75,000 and then a $150,000 fine for every repeat violation. In addition to these fines, citizens can file lawsuits against your business or organization for being unable to access it, which could result in a large settlement.

Maintaining an ADA-compliant website helps protect your business against potential lawsuits and fines in addition to providing inclusive accommodations for all of your customers.

Is Your Business ADA Compliant?

Does your business need help becoming ADA Compliant?

Sun Sign Designs offers a full suite of digital accessibility solutions to help your website meet ADA Compliance. There’s no need to overhaul your website and rewrite code—we will seamlessly integrate our AI-powered accessibility widget into your website. We offer a secure and easy compliance solution that doesn’t require reworking your entire site.

Want to discuss digital accessibility and ADA Compliance in more depth? Contact us today to schedule a strategy session.