If you have recently found out your website’s ADA Accessibility scope and are wondering what it means, keep reading. And read right to the end to figure out the real secret of your score, and how to make it work for you.
The first step of any compliance process is getting an accurate picture of where you are today. There are many tools that will automatically calculate your compliance score. So how do they do that and what does your score mean?
Every score begins with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. So what are those?
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) were created by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), an international organization that develops web standards to enhance interactive experiences.
The guidelines are intended to be testable criteria to help determine if a website is easily accessible for people with disabilities.
Each guideline also has a set of requirements, known as Success Criteria.
In order to conform to WCAG’s standards, you need to test your website to ensure all elements meet the Success Criteria.
While most standards have only one level of conformance, to meet the needs of advancing technology and help websites become complaint WCAG 2.1 designated three levels of conformance:
Level A includes the simplest website changes, such as color contrast and font resizing. While these changes will certainly enhance the experience of a disabled user, it would not make the site completely accessible.
Level AA includes all requirements from Level A plus additional accessibility elements that will further enhance the users experience and allow the site to function nearly equally for a person identifying as disabled.
Level AAA is the highest level of accessibility, including all requirements form Levels A and AA plus additional elements that will ensure the site functions identically for every visitor, regardless of ability level.
W3C used common factors when setting the level of conformance including:
Boiled down, it means that the Success Criteria on which your site will be judged must be reasonably attainable, able to move forward as technology advances, and not unreasonably prevent the design from achieving the objective of the website.
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines exist to create accessibility for all, to ensure that your website equally serves every person who views it.
Every scoring tool begins with the WCAG Success Criteria and compares every element on your site against those Success Criteria.
Every time an element meets the Success Criteria, you get points.
Every time an element fails to meet the Success Criteria, you lose points. That might sound like an oversimplification, but it really is as simple as that.
And the best news about your score is that every website in every country that adheres to the WCAG plays by the same rules and is judged equally. As you remediate or fix the errors and violations on your website, your score goes up proportionally, creating a fully accessible experience for every visitor.
If finding out your score has freaked you out a bit, here is the big secret behind the score…
Sites that are not accessible can score 100% and sites that are fully accessible can score 50%. That’s because the initial score is generated by machine learning and artificial intelligence.
The key to true accessibility is having your findings reviewed and remediated by a compliance specialist.
Knowing your score is your start point, it’s the actions that are taken with that information that will determine if your site is accessible to all visitors.
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