ADA Accessibility

Often, when we think of ADA compliance, we think of such things as as ensuring accessible parking outside a business or providing reasonable accommodations for employees with disabilities. But, under the Americans with Disabilities Act, a business must also ensure its website is accessible. That’s because your business website is considered public, which falls under the ADA umbrella.

Website accessibility includes optimizing for screen readers (i.e., images with alternative text, proper heading heirarchy, descriptive links), providing audio alternatives and ensuring the site can be navigated via a keyboard, among other features designed to aid those with disabilities. There is a set of standards developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) that offers guidelines.

If we built your site, chances are good that some of the very basic ADA accessibility features like color contrast, font legibility, heading heirarchy, etc. are already in good shape, but sites change over time and maybe the site didn’t address all aspects of ADA accessibility because it was not a project focus when the site was developed.

We recommend taking some steps towards making sure that your website meets the basic ADA standards and shows that you have made a good faith effort to make your site accessible. This includes:

  • Checking and adjusting color contrasts in the design
  • Adding good, descriptive alt tags to site images
  • Ensuring that the site structure is screen reader-friendly (this is also good for SEO)
  • Posting an Accessibility Statement explaining what you are doing.

On a small site, this amounts to 1-2 hours of work to improve a website’s ADA accessibility and compliance. Note: this is not a solution that is guaranteed to win any lawsuits, but it does show a good faith effort has been made. Some of the tools linked from this page will allow you to do so some of this checking yourself.

Then, if you want to take things further, there are several commercial ADA compliance services available on the market  that claim to be able to help you achieve full ADA compliance. We don’t recommend any of them and encourage you to read this article before engaging with any of them.

Tax Credit for Bringing Your Site into Compliance

It’s possible to get a tax deduction for any expenses you incur bringing your site into compliance.

“Many small businesses that incurred expenses for ADA compliance (whether for website accessibility or other approved expenses) may qualify for the tax credit.

According to the IRS, a small business qualifies if it had gross receipts of $1 million or less or fewer than 30 full-time employees in the preceding tax year.

You can receive up to 50% of eligible expenses, including costs associated with website ADA compliance, in the form of an IRS tax credit. The only caveat is that the expenses must be between $250 and $10,000 for the taxable year.

Claiming the tax credit is simple using IRS Form 8826 (Disabled Access Credit). Your accountant or tax specialist can confirm you qualify and that you have eligible expenses (listed on the second page of Form 8826).

Complying with the ADA guidelines for your business website is an excellent way to earn a tax credit of up to $5,000 and follow good business practices. The Americans with Disabilities Act helps ensure people of all abilities have access to public spaces and places. When your website is accessible to all, it’s a win-win situation!”

Read full article in Forbes…