You must make sure that your website is accessible to handicapped individuals. It turns out this is more than a social responsibility these days. Ignore these requirements and face a possible lawsuit or at the least get a demand letter. And don’t forget about the possible loss of business.
Enter accessiBe. This software uses one line of code and AI to keep your website ADA and WCAG compliant. It takes as little as 48 hours to bring your website up to speed and ensure that it’s easily accessible to anyone who visits your website, whether they’re visually impaired or blind, have any cognitive disability, epilepsy and so on.
ADA Web Compliance
Then ongoing monitoring keeps everything in line with WCAG 2.1. This refers to the Americans with Disabilities Act and other accessibility requirements.
You need to stay on the right side of compliance. As a result, you face an ongoing battle. It’s expensive too if you’re going to hire someone to do the work manually. accessiBe scans and updates every 24 hours. That’s another aspect small business owners don’t need to worry about as once you install accessiBe on your website, it will do all the heavy-lifting for your business, in the background.
Small Business Trends uses the software on this website.
Leland McFarland, Small Business Trends, Chief Technology Officer, explains. “We have started to see other businesses started to get targeted for law suits due to them not being accessible,” he wrote. “So, our CEO and I thought that it would be good to make sure that our site was accessible in order to protect it from being sued.”
Why You Need it on Your Website
There are a few reasons why using a service like Accessibe is important for businesses of all sizes.
The first big reason is because you want to be able to respect all accessibility compliance laws.
If you don’t, there’s a risk of getting sued by your website visitors. These lawsuits could easily cost you up to $20,000 or more in litigation as a small and medium business.
That is a cost that most small businesses can’t afford. The only way to avoid these costs is to ensure that your website is WAG and ADA compliant and that everyone, no matter what disability they have, can use your website safely.
The second big reason is that if your website isn’t accessible to everyone, you’re essentially turning away potential customers.
At this moment, there are over a billion people, or about 15% of the world’s population, that have some kind of disability. That could mean that 15% of your audience has a disability and therefore can’t use your website as you intended. Because of this, you could be losing business and potential customers until your website is accessible to everyone.
Who is accessiBe For?
You might be tempted to think that only huge enterprises and corporations are in danger of litigation. But the truth is, any business, no matter how small or big, can be sued by their visitors.
That is why web accessibility should be a priority for all types of businesses, small, medium and large.
Plus, it’s not just about avoiding litigation for your business. It’s also about making the browsing experience great for everyone who visits your website. This way, you’ll improve your website analytics (such as time spent on site, pages visited, actions taken) as well as make more sales.
How AccessiBe Works
All you need to do to get started is install one line of JS code.
The AI feature starts the process by scanning your website. It analyzes the information and categorizes it into useful information for the compliance process. One of the big bonuses here is this system works on websites that are updated daily.
Got a business with sections that change with product updates and the like? You can become totally inaccessible after only a year. The company highlights 96% success rate on their website.
Best of all is it’s simple and that’s music to the ears of most harried small business owners. You install the JavaScript code to your website, accessiBe scans and analyzes your pages for any accessibility issues, and less than 48 hours later your website is accessible to your entire audience.
There are two sides to the product.
Turns out accessiBe uses two different components that work together. The first is an application that runs in the foreground.
It’s called the Accessibility Interface and it looks after 30% of the compliance requirements. Most of these are the ones involving UI and design. The other part is powered by AI and Machine Learning. That looks after the other 70% of accessibility requirements.
There’s also an Accessibility Statement your small business will get via email. accessiBe has over 50 features disabled people can use to tailor any website to their personal needs.
On the user end, there are color adjustments for people who are colorblind and alterations for fonts for the visually impaired. There is a dictionary that covers expressions and slayings as well as phrases for people with cognitive issues.
The product also looks after people with motor impairments like Parkinson’s by optimizing keyboards. There’s also image recognition technologies for the blind.
When the accessiBe installation is finished on your website, all of your visitors will see an icon in the right-hand bottom corner of their screen. When they click on it, they’ll see and be able to choose the “accessibility profile” that they need. For example:
- Epilepsy-safe profile, which eliminated flashes and reduces colour from your website
- Visually impaired profile, which enhances your website’s visuals
- Cognitive disability profile, which assists visitors with reading and focusing
- ADHD-friendly profile, which eliminated distractions to improve focus
- Blind users profile, which allows blind visitors to use your website with their screen reader. This can also turn on the keywboard navigation motor so that motor-impaired people can operate your website using certain shortcuts from their keyboards
Visitors can also make other adjustments by themselves if they want to.
For example, they can make adjustments to your websites’ content, such as: highlighting titles and links, adding a text magnifier, changing font sizes, line heights, and text alignment, as well as adjusting letter spacing.
Another option for your visitors is make color adjustments: optimizing the contrast, adjusting text, title and background colours and changing the colour saturation.
Last but not least, they can also make orientation adjustments, including hiding images, adding a big white or black cursor to their screen, muting sounds, adding a virtual keyword and a reading guide and stopping any animations.
This way, your visitors can quickly select the option that is best suited for their needs and disabilities or they can completely personalize their website browsing experience exactly like they want and need it.
Once a visitor selects any accessibility option in your website’s accessiBe menu, accessiBe will immediately implement those changes. Your visitors won’t have to wait at all or even have to refresh the page to see the changes and start using your website.
Other Features
The list of features that accessiBe covers is impressive and includes, among many other features:
- 10 different languages that can be accessed from the interface.
- Specialized keyboard navigations that include tweaks for the drop downs.
- The ability to change text and title colors.
- The ability to stop animations and blinks that can trigger people with epilepsy.
You can see a full list of all of accessiBe’s features here.
Another big advantage you’ll see to this product involves other website functions. For example, accessiBe doesn’t interfere with a lot of the website functions you need.
McFarland says it does several things well. “accessiBe crawls your site and a lot of the work is done on their end or on the user’s computer,” he says. “This makes it so no extra work needed by your web server, keeping our page speed relatively unaffected.”
How to Find Out How Accessible Your Website Is
Before you get accessiBe, you might be wondering how accessible your website currently is, including:
- Whether it could pose any issues to visitors with disabilities
- Whether it’s WAG and ADA compliant
To do this, you can use accessiBe’s free forever accessibility tester tool, Ace, here.
Simply copy your website address in the field provided and click on Get Results. This will result in a pop-up containing your accessibility report. You can also send it to your email address and download it as a PDF.
The report will tell you exactly what you’re doing right and what you’re doing wrong. It goes through all the relevant elements on your site (such as clickable items, all the graphics you use, any forms, etc.) and explains what changes you need to make to each element.
And, it also tells you if your website is WAG and ADA compliant and therefore, whether your website visitors could sue you.
This is a completely free service so anyone can use it to check any website. Plus, it only takes a few seconds to run and generate the report.
Pricing
The company offers several different plans. They all start with a 7-day trial which gives you at least 5 days of actively leveraging the product, as it takes about 48 hours for the accessiBe engine and AI to make your website accessible for all people with disabilities.
For example, the basic version costs $490 a year. The advanced plan charges $1490 annually. And the premium option comes in at $3500 with a much larger number of allowed webpages. An enterprise version starts at $990 a month with unlimited webpages included.
This is quite cheap considering the costs involved in litigation if any of your website visitors decide to sue you. Not to mention, think of all the potential customers you could be losing even as you’re reading this review, just because they can’t use your website as you intended.
Conclusion
Today’s successful small business owner wants to be socially responsible. They also want to tap into every existing market. And accessiBe helps with these goals. You’ll find excellent features like automatic AI powered audits and monthly cloud updates. The product also offers full customization.
accessiBe is the affordable efficient way to make your website accessible and keep it that way.
McFarland sums it up perfectly for the small business owners considering this product. “accessiBe helps us get access to the corner of the market that would not be able to enjoy our content. Disabled people can read our site now. This in turn improves our overall site metrics and hopefully that help us with Google.”
Image: accessibe.com
Aira Bongco
This is amazing. This way, you’ll have a scanner on what you need to do in order for your business to stay compliant
I notice that this service is implemented on this site! Rob: Thanks for writing on this tool.