The ADA applies to websites, not just buildings. Target, Starbucks, and KFC all lost accessibility lawsuits with settlements between $30k and $100k. A floating widget lets users adjust fonts, colors, contrast, and read pages aloud for $10 a month.
of ADA compliance? I'm sure you have as business owners. We all think about it as things like pushing a button and having your front door open, having the wider stalls in our bathrooms to accommodate wheelchairs, uh, if you're a place that has like a restaurant, having the wheelchair accessible tables, all of that kind of stuff, the ramps that are on corners, all of that is a part of ADA compliance. But did you know that it also applies online to our websites? A lot of people don't really understand this, uh, and there are people out there who sue businesses because their website is not ADA compliant. Well, what exactly does that mean? When it comes to online, what does ADA compliance mean? Well, it's simple stuff like adding captions to your videos so they can be read instead of heard, making the fonts on your website bigger. If you haven't noticed, a lot of modern websites these days have much larger text. There's a reason for that. It makes it ADA compliant. In fact, Google has actually said that they will stop ranking websites that use text smaller than 14 points or 14 pixels. So that's kind of become the minimum, where it used to be 10 and 12. So 14 is the minimum. If you have an old site, you might want to check that If you're using a new modern theme on your website, you can probably set it site-wide and be an easy fix. But that's just a small piece. A lot of things on websites have to do with the contrast between the background and the foreground. Like, have you read these sites that use a white background and light gray text? I mean, come on. It was a thing a while ago, but I personally hated it. I have never created a website that way and I never will because I can't read them. So again, ADA compliance, it's that contrast between is it easy to read? Are you using two colors that are too close together in tone? If it's viewed as black and white. It's another big one. There's a lot of people that are colorblind, uh, and all of the pastel colors look gray and they pretty much all look the same shade of gray. So it all blends together and you're looking at nothing. Uh, as an example, there's also a thing called red-green colorblind. And if you're red-green colorblind or red colorblind or green colorblind, those appear as black. So if your banner is dark and you're using red text because that looks so pretty against black, well, a colorblind person was going to go in there and it's just going to look black. You're not— they're not even going to see the text. So again, that's a color combination to stay away from online. But the bottom line is you don't know what, um, condition someone might have that is viewing your website. So you could do all of these different things and it was going to be much more closer to being ADA compliant, but yet you still don't know. So what I've opted to do on my websites is I have a suite of tools that gives the control to the user. It shows up as just a little wheelchair icon that floats around my website, and, um, if someone clicks on that, it brings up a suite of tools that could allow them to change the fonts. So if you're using a fancy font, it'll change it all to Arial for them, so it's very easy to read. That's just one example. It can allow them to change the colors change the contrast. They could highlight a paragraph or a page and it's going to read it to them so they can just hear it. Uh, if there's any doubt on being able to read it, hey, let's listen to it. Um, those types of things this tool does as giving them control. So whoever visits your site would have the opportunity to see that and use that and make your website usable for them. And that's the key. Your website needs to be usable for every person that comes to your website. You don't want to be excluding anyone. And this is where ADA compliance comes in. So as long as you are being inclusive, then there's a lot lesser chance that you're going to be sued. And when I say sued, you won't win. Huge companies like Target and Starbucks and Kentucky Fried Chicken, and huge stars like Beyoncé, people that have all the money in the world behind them, have not won. So how is a small business owner like me and like you ever going to win? These— most of them don't even go to court because they know they're not going to win and they settle out of court. Well, a settlement can be anywhere from $30,000 to $100,000. That would put me out of business. I'm guessing it would put you out of business as well if you are a small business owner. So it's better to be proactive. Uh, I offer this suite of tools at a very inexpensive rate. It's $10 a month or $100 a year and you get 2 months free. And if you go to websiteadatools.com, it'll take you right to the page on my website that shows this particular product. Um, so if you are interested in protecting yourself for a very low fee from ever having to pay out exorbitant fees because of something that you just didn't know. Oh, here's the other thing. They don't care if you just didn't know. They don't give you the opportunity to fix the problem. They're just wanting your money. So really, they're frivolous lawsuits. However, they haven't lost any of them. And I say they It's people going out looking, actually looking for websites, for businesses that are not compliant and just suing them. So it's terrible. There's nothing we can do to really avoid it. However, I feel really covered because I'm giving the control of how compliant my website is to the user and not just kind of leaving it out there willy-nilly for anything. So if you want to be protected, um, $10 a year— no, $10 a month, $100 a year— um, go ahead and go to websiteadatools.com. Thank you.
