Ensuring ADA Compliance Using accessiBe WordPress
A great plugin called accessiBe WordPress helps you make your websites and blogs 100% ADA compliant. Since every state and country has its own laws regarding accessible web design, we thought it would be useful to create this tool. It does everything for you – all you have to do is download the plugin and follow some simple instructions! We’re making accessibility as easy as possible for anyone who wants to be compliant without doing too much work.
ADA stands for the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, which “defined a disabled individual as one having a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities.” In addition, Congress defined certain conditions, such as blindness, deafness, alcoholism, etc., to be disabilities.
The success of your wordpress website or blog depends mostly on its traffic and SEO ranking. If you want to get the most people to find and visit your site, then it needs to be optimized for search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. However, there is a hidden danger for websites using Flash player, Javascript, and other dynamic content – screen readers cannot read these components out loud! Most of the time, users will not know about this issue until they encounter one such inaccessible page while browsing your site via their mobile device with voiceover enabled. Then what’s going to happen? The user will leave in disgust while thinking that your website sucks. This means fewer visitors and less money in your pocket! Now that we’ve established the importance of having an accessible website let’s see what this accessiBe plugin can do for you.
The main purpose of accessiBe is to eliminate the need for time consuming manual work involved in making your WordPress site ADA compliant; that way, you don’t have to worry about designing, coding, and testing every page one by one. The plugin will work with any theme or template currently installed on WordPress 3.5+, including most mobile themes (WPtouch). Also, please note that it only works with static front pages – if you want to make sure something else is 100% accessible too, then use our free static page generator plugin FlexiPage, which will generate a static HTML version of each post/page, thus making them accessible too.
One of the main features of accessiBe is that it provides a WYSIWYG interface for creating accessible links. This lets you choose from a list of pre-defined link roles classified as landmarks, navigation links, heading links, etc. Then just click Add New, and your link will be added to the page, following all the relevant rules and guidelines.
Adding a new link role is as simple as clicking Add New button and choosing one of the available options: blue underlined text that typically links to other pages or websites (new navigation), heading (main), heading (sub-page), image (landmark for screen reader users), definition (definition list), etc.
Control all of your post/page links on a single screen! Just click Edit under the Link Roles section to start adding, editing, or removing elements using the convenient drag-and-drop interface.