ADA Compliance – How accessible is your website?

The Americans with Disabilities Act, otherwise known as ADA requires that places of public accommodation are fully accessible. Your website is no exception. There is a lot of gray area in the law as it stands today, but it hasn’t stopped the huge increase in lawsuits over the last year with websites that don’t meet these standards. This has been especially true in the automotive industry.

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

Hi, I’m Tina Cuatto from DealerOn. We’re giving Kelcey and the SEO team the week off to talk to you about a very important topic that is front and center in the minds of every business today – ADA Compliance.

The Americans with Disabilities Act, otherwise known as ADA requires that places of public accommodation are fully accessible. Your website is no exception. There is a lot of gray area in the law as it stands today, but it hasn’t stopped the huge increase in lawsuits over the last year with websites that don’t meet these standards. This has been especially true in the automotive industry.

Many manufacturers and website providers, DealerOn included, have gone to great lengths to ensure that we have an out of the box website platform that meets ADA standards. Unfortunately, this problem goes well beyond website providers. Dealerships are updating inventory, specials, content, and blog posts on a near daily basis making it extremely difficult if not impossible to stay ahead of the game.

So just how bad is your website?

Don’t worry it’s really easy to see just how ADA friendly your website is. Digital Marketing companies like DealerOn, and – lawyers use tools like this one, called WAVE that help evaluate issues that might be affecting your customers with disabilities.

Just put your website’s URL in the box and go.

Wave will then show you just how many errors and alerts they found on your website. Errors are something that need your immediate attention, because they are very likely causing your customers problems.

So as you can see there’s a really easy way to see how ADA friendly your website is. Unfortunately, if you’re like most companies out there and haven’t taken any precautions, you’re probably going to see quite a few errors popping up on that report.

The good news is that at DealerOn we’ve partnered with an innovative company called accessiBe to offer an affordable solution that takes all those errors, and turns them into zeroes. accessiBe’s plugin is the first and only TRULY automated ada solution in the market that uses AI and machine learning to scan and fix the problems on your website, and not just once a month – but every day. accessiBe boasts a 96% success rate, so there is no better way to protect your company.

On top of that, accessiBe has integrated directly with Wave. A popup will appear ensuring that anyone testing your website knows that you are making a good faith effort to create an online experience for everyone.

DealerOn offers this great plugin as an add-on in every OEM program that we participate in, and is also available through retail. Reach out to find out how you can start protecting yourself today.

Thanks again for tuning in, Kelcey and team will be back next week with another Wednesday Workshop!