Before discussing whether a WordPress site is ADA compliant, the first thing to learn about is ADA compliance. The full meaning of ADA is Americans with Disabilities Act compliance; this means that websites and blogs need to be accessible to people with disabilities.
The Department of Justice passed a law in 2010 that websites need to be inclusive to everyone, including people living with disabilities. However, not all sites need to be ADA compliant, but it does not hurt to follow the procedures to make a site compliant with ADA services.
It is a criminal offense for sites with a mandatory law to have ADA compliance services to lack them. They may end up paying a fine or serving jail time. It is, therefore, essential for a WordPress Site to be ADA compliant and, if not, what plugins should be used to make it ADA compliant.
Is your WordPress site Ada compliant?
An ADA compliant site makes it easy for people who have disabilities to use a site freely without any barrier. Whether the person cannot see or hear, that should not be a factor that will make them not understand or comprehend the information on a website.
Luckily for sites that have been built on a WordPress platform, there is a way to make content on there ADA compliant, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines WCAG for short can be used to check whether your WordPress is obedient to the laws. However, WCAG does not always work and cannot scan, mostly if a plugin was used to build the website. To ensure that the site is compliant, three popular plugins will be discussed later in the article.
So, what are WordPress plugins?
WordPress Plugins are extra software that is downloaded or bought for a website to make it more customized to the purpose or the theme of the website. When someone builds a website, the site is straightforward and looks similar to anyone else’s place, even though the content is entirely different.
This is where plugins are used to customize and personalize a website. A person can also use a plugin as an ADA compliance service; by buying or downloading the plugins, someone can enter the URL site’s name, and the plugin does the checking; it is that easy. Here are three plugins anyone can use to check and use as ADA compliance services.
Accessibility Suite
One of the mandatory sites that need to be ADA compliant are sites that deal with information concerning the public or areas that are governmental bodies. The Accessibility Suite plugin is responsible for checking government and public site compliance to the 508 law. The plugin is entirely free and easy to download and install on the website.
WP Accessibility helper
The plugin is one of the most popular with many site owners. The plugin has both free and paid versions. WP Accessibility helps improve the fonts containing audio messaging and many more options to make a site more ADA compliant. It is easy to use and has more options than the paid-for version. A con of the plugin is that it does not work most of the time as ADA compliance services.
WP ADA Compliance Check Basic
The checker has tons of features that introduce new ADA features and make corrections on the ones the owner has but on his or her website. The plugin also generates reports of how the new accessibility has impacted people and what should be done to improve on short visits, and what to do to maintain the high traffic.