The growth of global retail e-commerce sales has continued to rise exponentially over the past decade, reaching an expected total of $6.3 trillion in 2023.
According to Forbes, that number is projected to continue to grow in the years to come, climbing up to an expected total of over $8.1 trillion in 2026.
Simply put, e-commerce is here to stay, and at this point, no business can afford to ignore it anymore. Online shopping allows for an easy and convenient buying experience that can accommodate our modern busy lifestyles, so it’s no wonder that it’s slowly but surely becoming the preferred shopping method of millions of people worldwide.
In addition, social media commerce is also on the rise, with $2.9 trillion in sales expected to be reached by 2026. That means that as a business owner it’s critically important to invest into social media commerce if you don’t want to leave money on the table.
However, e-commerce and social media commerce can often disregard the needs of people with disabilities, which are estimated by the World Health Organization to number over 1.3 billion people worldwide, or around 16% of the entire world’s population.
What is ADA Compliance?
People with vision, hearing, mobility, and/or cognitive disabilities can often be excluded from the online shopping experience, so it’s become an important moral and business consideration to ensure web accessibility of one’s business. Not to mention, it’s a major legal requirement.
The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requires all businesses and organisations classified as public accommodations to provide equal access to goods and services to customers with disabilities in their brick-and-mortar stores and online domains. Fulfilling ADA compliance ensures businesses are fully accessible to millions of potential customers.
However, since ADA doesn’t offer specific guidelines for fulfilling ADA compliance requirements, it must follow the global standards established by the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). This ensures that a business's goods and services can be accessible to as wide of a customer pool as possible.
Let’s examine available checker tools that can help you easily reach ADA and WCAG compliance.
What Does ADA Compliance Check Include?
To ensure ADA compliance, it’s necessary to check your website for the following elements:
- Vision accessibility: including audio descriptions for videos and ALT text for images for people with vision impairments and people using assistive technology tools such as screen-reading software; ensuring sufficient color contrast between the text and the background and avoiding the use of color alone to signify meaning or convey information for people with color blindness
- Hearing accessibility: including captions, transcripts, and/or sign language translations for video content, and transcripts for audio-only content such as podcasts, for people with hearing impairments
- Cognition accessibility: offering different strategies to navigate web content, clear page structure, understandable language, easily readable text, clear and consistent navigation, no potentially seizure-inducing elements, removing time limits from all website elements, etc. for people with cognitive and learning disabilities
- Mobility accessibility: ensuring all functionality via keyboard, providing a “skip to content” link, allowing flexible input options, web responsiveness and content viewability, etc. for people who have issues with mobility
To learn more about the complete ADA compliance requirements, check out the WCAG 2 page. Note that most commonly, it’s legally required for websites to reach WCAG 2.0 AA conformance level (where A is the most basic and AAA the most advanced conformance level).
Top ADA Compliance Checker Tools
In this section, we’ll offer a selection of ADA compliance checker tools that you might find useful. Note that the majority of these checker tools have free basic options that help you discover accessibility errors, and paid advanced options that can help you fix them. So, here are our top choices:
accessScan
accessScan is a free and accurate AI-powered tool that represents the industry standard for manual accessibility testing and is trusted by thousands of worldwide businesses, including Forbes, HBO, and BMW. It’s designed to focus on ADA and WCAG 2.1 Level AA compliance. Simply type in a website page, and accessScan will perform a quick but thorough examination, then offer you a detailed audit with a score for each test that you can download in a PDF file (note that you can only check one page at a time rather than the whole website at once).
Siteimprove
Similarly to accessScan, Siteimprove also offers you an opportunity to check your website for ADA and WCAG accessibility issues one page at a time. The great thing about Siteimprove is that it helps you prioritize issues that need to be fixed based on where they occur, conformance level, and fixing difficulty. Though the ADA compliance check is free, the paid software also helps you grow your business by improving your overall website performance.
a11y Color Contrast Accessibility Validator
This completely free and very simple tool focuses specifically on checking the color contrast on your website to ensure there is a sufficient distinction between the text and the background. As mentioned earlier, this is a particularly important concern for users who are colourblind, have low vision, or are otherwise visually impaired. a11y is specifically designed for WCAG 2.1 AA conformance level.
ACTF aDesigner
ACTF aDesigner is a free disability simulator that is particularly focused on ensuring that content and applications are accessible to and usable by individuals who are blind or have low vision. It checks web content to make sure it works well with assistive technology tools such as voice browsers and screen readers. It also checks accessibility of Open Document Format (ODF) files and Flash content. However, keep in mind that it only works on Windows operating systems.
CSS HTML Validator
This tool is specifically designed to check HTML, CSS, SEO, spelling, accessibility, mobility (Android/iOS), JavaScript Linter, links, and much more. The advantage of CSS HTML Validator is that it works offline, there is no Internet access required, thus protecting your privacy. Other than Windows, it also offers options for Mac and Linux operating systems.
SortSite Desktop
SortSite Desktop is a simple, one-click tool for both Windows and Mac that tests your website for a variety of accessibility and usability issues. It quickly and efficiently checks each page of your website against 1300 rules regarding ADA compliance, web standards, browser compatibility, SEO, broken links, spelling errors, etc. Its products are used in more than 50 countries by some of the world’s largest organizations, including US Department of Justice, NASA, Toyota, Disney, UK Royal Mail, and McCann Erickson.
UsableNet AQA
What makes UsableNet AQA stand out from the rest of the competition is that it shows you exactly how someone with disabilities may use your website. It also offers advanced functionality options, such as previewing how your site works with screen readers. UsableNet AQA is particularly useful for the most complex websites that have hundreds or even thousands of pages, as it can scan the entire site (or multiple sites) at one time rather than manually testing one page a time.
Rocket Validator
Another great option for larger websites is Rocket Validator, an automated web crawler that with a single click can scan up to 5,000 pages for accessibility, HTML and CSS conformance issues. It can also help you scan your website at different screen resolutions and a variety of devices, including iPhone, iPad, Samsung Galaxy, Kindle, laptops with HiDPI or MDPI screens, and many others. Additionally, you can schedule continuous automatic monitoring on a daily, weekly or monthly basis so you can easily stay on top of things and immediately address any arising issues.
These ADA compliance checker tools can help you not only ensure that people with disabilities can fully access and engage with your website, they will ensure a better user experience for everyone. What’s more, they can help you increase your web traffic, improve your SEO, minimize your legal risks, and extend your market reach in the long run, thus justifying the costs of investment.
