July is Disability Pride Month, an observance that subverts the notion that Disability is something to hide. Instead, that Disability is an identity to be celebrated and held with honor. There are many reasons to ensure design and development considers people with disabilities. The most paramount reason being it is the right thing to do, a DMi value.

Over 61 million Americans have a severe disability, and 10% of them are unseen. Whether employees choose to disclose that information, at DMi we understand that we likely have team members working on their mental health, dealing with pain, or a chronic illness. By supporting wellbeing and promoting a sustainable and engaging hybrid work environment, we believe we are helping make work more accessible for employees with a diverse array of abilities.

While we strive for inclusivity in this regard, we also encourage our clients to do the same for their websites. An inclusive internet starts by ensuring websites are ADA compliant. ADA compliance is a foundational standard to ensure websites are designed with measures to increase the usability for people with disabilities and the tools they use to navigate the world. Becoming ADA compliant is possible by following a series of guidelines developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) that provide a detailed set of standards for making web content accessible to people with disabilities: WCAG, or the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.

The WCAG guidelines are organized around four main principles, Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, Robust (POUR), that provide the necessary foundations for web content access and usage.

• Perceivable - “Information and user interface components must be presentable to users in ways they can perceive.”
• Operable - “User interface components and navigation must be operable.”
• Understandable - “Information and the operation of the user interface must be understandable.”
• Robust - “Content must be robust enough that it can be interpreted by a wide variety of user agents, including assistive technologies.”

WCAG Success Criteria are broken down into levels of conformance as well: A (basic conformance), AA (intermediate conformance), and AAA (advanced conformance). Organizations looking to meet Level AA fully must meet all requirements of the lower level. The WCAG website details all criteria that are required to achieve ADA compliance. Companies must audit their website to make sure they are compliant. There are several ways to do this:

• Free compliance checker tools, like WAVE and Lighthouse:
  • These can be helpful as a starting point, but they generally only show lower-level issues.
• Manual audit using the W3C of evaluation tools for reference:
  • Manual auditing could be practical depending on how well you can follow the guidelines.
• Get a professional ADA audit:
  • Accessibility experts will run software tools and manually review your site looking for issues automated scans can’t pick up on and use screen readers and other assistive technologies.

As stated above, making the internet a more inclusive space is the right thing to do. However, there is also a business case. You are not only expanding your user and consumer base, but web accessibility improves SEO efforts and search rankings, therefore, it ensures that anyone looking for your product can find it. If you are not compliant, you can risk losing millions of internet users that cannot navigate your website, and you leave yourself open to the risk of a lawsuit.

Knowledge of accessibility is essential for designers and developers that want to create fully accessible websites. As a branding and interactive agency, DMi ensures that projects are built with this knowledge, assuring our clients that their web content does not exclude people from using their products and services. ADA compliance allows consumers to use and access web content without constraints, leading to increased customer satisfaction and brand loyalty.