Any home remodeling contractor knows that the right website can make all the difference for their business. Think about it: Your website is the foundation of your entire digital marketing strategy, and everything from your pay-per-click ads to social media posts should link back to your site to encourage prospects to convert into leads. It’s where you bring prospects to convert them into leads and, ultimately, paying customers—and you need an amazing web design to get the job done right.
Of course, you’ll need to regularly update your website design or revamp your home remodeling website to keep your brand relevant. While there are multiple factors you’ll need to consider to successfully launch a new website, one of the most important is ensuring it complies with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).
According to the CDC, 26 percent of adults in the United States have a disability. From restricted mobility to visual impairments, disabilities can make it harder for prospects to navigate your website, learn more about your company, and hire you for their next home improvement job. The solution? You need to build an ADA-accessible website to give your customers a seamless user experience from start to finish.
We know what you’re thinking: “Making an ADA-accessible website sounds like a lot of work.” The good news? The Website Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) offer actionable steps to improve your website so you can create an accessible experience for everyone. Here’s how to get started.
Before we dive into ADA-accessible website features, let’s start with a simple question: What exactly is ADA compliance? The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which was passed in 1990, prohibits discrimination against people with disabilities. In other words, the ADA ensures all people with disabilities have the same rights and opportunities as those without. In 2010, the Americans with Disabilities Act Standards for Accessible Design was passed, which mandates all electronic and information technology (see: websites) to be accessible to those with disabilities, such as vision impairment and hearing loss.
Web design can create unnecessary barriers that make it difficult—or even impossible—for people with disabilities to use them. But what does an ADA-compliant website look like? Under the WCAG, website accessibility issues are divided into four groups:
So, which businesses are required to comply with ADA regulations? According to Title I, any business with at least 15 full-time employees that operates for 20 or more weeks annually is covered by the law. With that said, even if you’re not required to follow ADA guidelines, taking the time to create an ADA-compliant website can help you create a better website experience for your customers—which can make all the difference for your home remodeling business.
Now that you know why you need an ADA-accessible home remodeling website, how can you create one? Even if you’re not a web design pro, making simple tweaks to your web design, like adding alternative (alt) text to your pictures, can transform your site’s user experience.
At the end of the day, an accessible website translates to more visitors and encourages leads to spend longer on your website. So, what are you waiting for?
Many internet users with disabilities are unable to use a mouse for website navigation. Instead, they rely on keyboards or other input devices to browse websites. However, keyboard-friendly navigation is typically overlooked by web designers—and the numbers back this up. In a 2019 analysis of 10 million web pages, 98 percent of website menus weren’t fully accessible, partly due to a lack of keyboard navigation.
How can you integrate keyboard navigation into your web design? Some intuitive keyboard navigation tools include using the ‘Enter’ key to open your website dropdown menu and the ‘Esc’ key to close these menus. Meanwhile, the ‘Tab’ key enables website users to navigate between different page elements, and arrows make it easier to navigate within widgets.
The most challenging component of keyboard navigation? Forms. Form validation gives users an instant notification if they leave a field empty. If keyboard navigation brings users back to the incomplete field and prevents them from moving on, you might have a keyword trap.
After all, you don’t know why someone is navigating your form. With keyboard navigation, they might be exploring the form to determine what information is needed. Or maybe they’re filling in the form, but they don’t have that piece of information on hand. Either way, skipping over one field shouldn’t prevent them from filling out the remaining fields.
Chances are, you’re already including images on your landing pages, portfolio, and blog posts. Visual elements play an important role in conveying information to leads, but that’s an obvious issue for vision-impaired website visitors. Instead of hoping for the best, make life easier for your website visitors by adding alt text under each image.
Alt text is used by screen readers, players, and voiceovers to describe visual website elements to users. For the best results, it should provide a clear description of each image so someone using a screen reader can easily understand what your picture was meant to convey. It should also describe the purpose the image serves on your website.
In addition to boosting accessibility, keyword-rich alt text can also drive up your search engine rankings with on-page search engine optimization (SEO). Not only do alt tags help search engine crawlers, but not creating alt tags can have a detrimental effect on your contractor website’s search rankings. Your goal is to ensure that every visitor (and search engines) can access your content by setting descriptive alt text for your website images.
Images aren’t the only form of media that requires an alternative access solution. Audio-only content, like customer testimonials, should have the same information presented in transcript form.
At the same time, videos should use captioning to help hearing-impaired users understand content that would otherwise be inaccessible to them. Video captions should include the words spoken, who’s speaking when it’s not evident, and any important sounds like music, sound effects, and laughter. And remember: Captions should always be synchronized with your visual content.
If you’re not sure where to start, voice recognition software can help you save time with captioning videos. That said, most automatically generated captions require editing to ensure clarity, so you’ll want to preview the captions before uploading the video content to your website.
Take some time to review your website’s style and elements, from your headings and buttons to your in-text links. Think about the different users who access your home remodeling website to create a user-friendly experience for every website visitor. People with limited vision or color blindness might have a hard time reading text if there’s little contrast between the text and background (for example, light gray text on a light-colored background).
Instead of using color to give information, create a visual hierarchy with different web elements. People who are color blind might not pick up on visual cues because they can’t distinguish certain colors from others. In addition, screen readers don’t indicate the color of text on a screen, so your meaning might be lost. To remove color from your website navigation, make sure all menus, links, and buttons are clearly organized and delineated from each other.
It might be tempting to stick to a cookie-cutter website template, but it’s time to run toward the fire. When you transform your user experience with an ADA-accessible website, you’ll gain a competitive edge over other local home remodelers—all while driving more leads and conversions for your company.
Ready to take your website to the next level? At Company 119, our web design experts can help you build a website aligned with your business strategy and sales goals. Give us a call today to take a different approach to web design.
