Make Your Website Accessible For Individuals with Disabilities
WordPress Accessibility
Tools for ADA Compliance & Accessibility Best Practices
WordPress Plugins & Resources for WordPress Accessibility And ADA Compliance
Website Accessibility is a term that implies a website can be viewed, read, understood or observed by people with disabilities; it does not simply mean that your website is live and can be accessed on the internet (for that see Uptime Monitoring, which is part of WordPress Security & Performance Optimization). For a site to be accessible it needs to accomdate individuals with visual, hearing, or cognitive disabilities, including those who use and those who don’t use a device to assist them.
Website Accessibility is mandated by the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) Title III for businesses with 15 employees or more. Businesses that have less than 15 employees may still want to consider it for any of the following reasons:
- Their brand is specifically made to serve people with disabilities (including nonprofits).
- Local state and cities where the business is located might have additional mandates.
- The business wants to expand their customer base to all possible customers
- The business wants to look more professional and accomodating to all possible customers
- Accessbility is good for SEO.
Note that beyond website accessbility, the ADA also mandates guidelines for all businesses that have a physical location.
ADA Standards for Accessible Design and the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines provide outlines for making websites more accessbile. Many of these standards overlap with Conversion Optimization, though Accessibility Optimization is considered it’s own, seperate service.
These tools are listed to help make WordPress websites more accessbile, but they do not guarantee 100% accessibility. For example, a tool might tell you that your website passes accessbility standards but the same tool might not detect if an embedded video has closed captioning or not. So even with these tools it’s important to consider the user experience for all possible users.
Mirex Marketing is not a law firm and does not offer legal advice. The content on this page is for informational purposes only.
accessiBe (Paid)
One of the most comprehensive suite of tools for accessibility and ADA compliance, if not the most comprehensive.
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The accessiBe team has met with Mirex Marketing, which is unusual for Saas. The fact that they met with us is impressive on it’s own.
Their website widget may look similar to other tools but its more sophisiticated. Most widgets will help the user change things like fonts and colors to make the site more readable for individuals with some disabilities. Yet, the accessiBe widget has AI to help with even more features such as keyboard navigation and screen reader to describe the site to blind users. It will even fill in “alt” descriptions for images where there are currently none.
In addition to their more advanced widget, accessiBe has tiers which include Comprehensive Litigation Support. While the ADA only mandates website accessibility for businesses with 15 employees or more, theoretically anyone could come after your business for not being ADA compliant regardless of business size. When this happens the Comprehensive Litigation Support comes in very handy!
Mirex Marketing is not a law firm and does not offer legal advice. The content on this page is for informational purposes only.
UserWay (Free & Paid)
WordPress Plugin and other tools for website accessibility. One of the leading providers.
AccessibilityChecker.org
Free and paid tiers for automated checking and other tools
Accesbility Scanners (Free Online)
These tools scan your website to see which accesbility guidelines it may be lacking.
Color Contrast Checkers (Free Online)
Helps ensure words can be read over their background on websites.
Accessibility Statement Generators (Free Online)
Use these tools to generate an accessbility statement for your website terms.
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WAVE Accessibility Tools (Free)
WAVE is a nonprofit organization providing a suite of free accessibility tools.
Web Accessibility Evaluation Tools List
Authoritative list of accessibility tools compiled by W3C.
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W3C is the World Wide Web Consortium which establishes guidelines for best website practices, including the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.
Some of the links to paid resources on this page might offer us a commission at no additional cost to you, if you click on the link on this page to get them. In some cases you might even get a discount by using our links. These are tools that we’d recommend even without the option to receive a commission. Paid or free, they were selected because either we’ve tried them or they have an outstanding reputation within the digital marketing community for being effective and well-developed. The only exception to that is when we provide links to other lists which we don’t control, but they may provide additional, useful resources.
Accessibility Optimization
Do you need help making your website more accessible?
Additional Marketing Resources
Find more information on suggested WordPress plugins, best WordPress hosting providers, tools for SEO and Social Media, and other tools that can be useful for your website and overall marketing. We aggregate these resources to help you save precious time.
Looking for Agency-Grade Resources?
In addition to the resources that we list freely and openly on the Resources section, which are intended for business owners and clients of Mirex Marketing, we have also compiled various agency-grade, developer-grade and publisher-grade resources available on the Downloads page.
Mirex Academy
What good is a tool or resource if you don’t know how to use it. Mirex Academy has multiple free and upgraded classes online which you can learn at your own pace. Check it out to become a rock star in your business.