visual impaired

As we covered in our last article, getting your website ADA compliant by 2018 is critical if you want to avoid problems (read; big, big problems) from the Department of Justice. Here’s a quick refresher.

Essentially, the DOJ wants all banking websites to be fully accessible for visual and hearing impaired people by 2018. If your website isn’t ready, you could run into issues with fines, getting sued, equal rights laws, and bad public perception. You don’t want that to happen, and neither do we (really, we like you).

So, what does the DOJ mean when it says you have to get your website ready? Glad you asked.

Making your website accessible — What the DOJ wants

The DOJ has several requirements under the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0. That’s a bit of a mouthful so we’ll break it down. This comes in two delicious compliance favors — The changes the DOJ requires, and what that means in terms of getting compliant.

Changes required by the DOJ under the ADA

There are over 70 (really!) specific requirements so we’re just looking at the high-level areas. Here are the direct quotes on what each one involves.

• 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 user interface must be understandable.
• Robust – Content must be robust enough so it can be interpreted reliably by a wide variety of user agents, including assistive technologies.

Now, that list doesn’t look very easy to understand (we know!) so here are some examples of what they mean in practice.

Perceivable — ADA Compliance

• Provide text alternatives for any non-text content — Having text descriptions of any images or interface components, making sure there’s a good text alternative that can be read by screen-reading software.
• Captions / sign language for prerecorded content — Videos and other media will need to have captions and / or sign language so hearing impaired people can get the information they need.

Operable — ADA Compliance

• Keyboard navigation — Your website should be completely usable and navigable using just a keyboard (i.e. There’s no requirement to use a mouse to access any specific part of your banking website.)
• Accessing media — Users should be able to easily pause, rewind, and interact with all the media (video, audio, and other) on your banking website.

Understandable – ADA Compliance

• Language of the webpage — The language on a specific webpage can be easily updated according to a user’s needs.
• Ease of use — A website must have consistent navigation and be easy to read and use.[/cs_text]

Robust – ADA Compliance

• Make sure all of your website enhancements for ADA work with all client browsers or other ways people access your website.
• Make sure your enhancements work with the various specialized hardware and software that visual and hearing impaired people use. (e.g. screen readers, braille interfaces, speech recognition etc.)

You probably don’t have the time to do all this (I mean, there are 70 requirements, and they’re not exactly… simple). That’s why we’re here.

Relax, we’ve got this

We understand just what it takes to get your banking website ADA compliant. We also understand you just don’t have the time. That’s why we’re here to help — We’ve already helped banks like Litchfield Bancorp and Collinsville Savings Society, and we’re here to help you.

Get in touch today and we’ll explain exactly how we’ll make your bank website ADA compliant. Get yourself some peace-of-mind.