What You Need to Know About WCAG Compliance Testing
What is WCAG compliance testing and how can it save your business?
We break it down in layman’s terms in today’s post. Read on to learn all you need to know about making your site accessible to everyone – and avoiding lawsuits – with WCAG compliance testing.
What is WCAG Compliance?
WCAG is an acronym for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, which are a series of web accessibility requirements developed by the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
(Are you feeling any acronym ague yet?)
Basically, WCAG compliance refers to whether or not your web site design adheres to certain accessibility standards.
Does My Site Need to be WCAG Compliant?
Yes. Business owners are now legally required to follow WCAG standards to make their content equally accessible for those with disabilities. WCAG compliance standards are accepted internationally.
What are The Risks of Non-Compliance?
Failing to comply with these international standards has serious financial and reputational costs.
A flood of lawsuits have been brought to state and federal courts by opportunistic lawyers looking to profit off of business owners who have neglected their websites.
And even if you dodge the lawsuits, non-compliance can damage your brand image by getting you labelled “non-inclusive.” Believe it or not, WCAG non-compliance will soon be considered the virtual equivalent of refusing to serve disabled clients at an establishment.
What are Some WCAG Compliance Testing Tools?
Before we go any further, we should speak on what evaluation tools can and cannot do. Web accessibility tools will help you identify a number of potential accessibility issues. They come in handy at all stages of your web design and development process. You can use WCAG compliance testing tools for fully-automated checks, or to buff up your manual review.
But WCAG compliance testing tools cannot cover all aspects of your web compliance, and cannot determine whether your site is accessible – they can only assist in doing so. Some tests can provide false or misleading results, particularly if you stray outside of the recommended checkers. To determine your accessibility, human judgment and ADA/WCAG compliance testing expertise are required.
The following WCAG compliance testing tools are recommended by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), an international community dedicated to the creation of fair and just web standards.
- 508 Checker. Simply enter your website URL to see if it meets 508 compliance and accessibility standards. It’s free software by Formstack that gives you a report of your evaluation results, but you’ll have to provide your name, email address, and a few other details to get it.
- A-Tester. Like 508 Checker, A-Tester helps with WCAG compliance, and it’s totally free, so why not add it to your testing toolkit? A-Tester checks the URL you enter against certain WCAG 2.0 Level-AA conformance criteria selected by Evaluera Ltd, the developers.
- A11y-checker. This open source software warns against potential HTML Markup code accessibility issues. It automatically checks single web pages, and can be used to check adherence on a number of criteria listed in the WCAG 2.0 and W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0.
Remember: these are just a few of the tools that will make up your WCAG compliance testing arsenal, and they cannot determine your site’s accessibility on their own.
How do I Schedule WCAG Compliance Testing?
ClickTecs specializes in ADA and WCAG compliance testing. Using a select combination of auditing tools, expertise, and a checklist with more than 300 items, we provide truly comprehensive testing that quickly detects compliance violations.
Visit https://clicktecs.com/contact to book a free consultation.
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