What is ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act)
Based on the Section 508 Amendment to the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, the ADA has set compliances to assist users with disabilities navigate through the World Wide Web. The visually impaired use browsers that read image attributes and elements on a webpage. These browsers assist with reading web pages and leading individuals where to click. There are also ADA compliances that aid people who are deaf or hard of hearing, requiring captions or transcripts for audio and video content.
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) provides a set of guidelines recognized internationally. Developed by the Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C), the governing body of the web, these guidelines are the basis of most web accessibility law in the world.
The Basics of ADA Section 508
These ADA compliances assist:
- Users who have limited or no use of their hands require all website content to be accessible via keyboard or other alternative input devices.
- Users who are low-vision or slowly losing their vision and require proper color contrast and easy-to-read fonts.
- Users who are blind or visually impaired that require software readers to interpret website content.
- Users with cognitive disabilities who require information to be easy to be easily understood
How ADA Compliances can have a Positive Impact on SEO Strategy
ADA compliant fixes also have SEO benefits for your website. What you do to help people with disabilities read and understand the content on your website also helps search engine spiders read, parse, cache, understand, and index the content on your website to rank better. This allows more visitors to find your website in organic search, i.e. Google and other search engines.
Below are five provisions from WCAG 2.0 that positively impact organic search performance:
Text Alternatives for all non-text content
Your Image results will greatly improve as this provision establishes that alt tags must be used for all images. This provision mandates that all non-text content be available in text. There are exceptions, but text is required to describe and explain non-text content.
This provision requires transcripts for audio-only media and a text or audio description for video-only media. This helps improve SEO because crawlers cannot understand non-text content within multimedia files.
Captions for pre-recorded media
This provision mandates the presence of synchronized captions for all pre-recorded media. YouTube has ways of manually adding captions to videos you upload, which can be read and indexed by their engine. YouTube also offers automatic captioning, however results may vary.
This simply establishes that text should be used instead of images of text. This essentially prevents search engines from failing to index critical elements of the page.
With backlinks being such an important aspect of search algorithms, this obviously aligns the most with SEO. This provision states that the purpose of a link can be determined from the link text alone. In other words, using keyword-based links is now a website development standard, and steers away from the use of “click here to learn more” anchor texts.
More about ADA
You can find a more comprehensive ADA checklist on webaim.org.
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