What percentage of your customers can view and do business on your website? Of course, we all hope the answer is 100%, but that’s not the case if your website has accessibility issues.

The American Community Survey (ACS) estimates that 12.8% of all users have accessibility needs that make using a non-accessible website difficult or impossible. Learning, vision, and mobility difficulties can all stop a potential customer from interacting with your site. People with certain disabilities often require accommodations to use a website such as text-to-speech, the ability to enlarge fonts, high contrast colors, and keyboard navigation.

How can you ensure your site is accessible?

We have good news, though: The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has created standards and recommended implementations through the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). These guidelines help developers and quality assurance engineers create and test web accessibility in a standardized and effective manner. The WCAG guidelines help define how websites should work with screen readers, how to make websites navigable with just a keyboard, how to use colors and font sizes that are the most readable, along many other helpful guidelines.

Emergent Software believes the web should be accessible to all and we love helping our clients design, build, and test accessible sites. We have helped our clients understand how accessible their existing sites are with an Accessibility Audit. The audit gives our clients peace of mind about potential lawsuits that could be threatened due to an inaccessible site.

Contact us today for an accessibility audit or to implement changes to make your site accessible to WCAG 2.1 standards so every user can use your site.