We’ve had several clients ask us about this, and we’ve been researching it for the past year or so, on exactly what we can do for anybody that owns a website, any of our clients that we’ve done websites for, what we can do to prevent any kind of issues with ADA compliance. This has to do with people that are visually impaired that visit your website and they’re able to get around and see everything they need to see on your website just like anybody else. That’s what it’s all about, but a lot of businesses are getting sued. Actually, let’s jump over to Google real quick and do a quick little search.
ADA, what’s the search ahead before? It’s actually, ADA website lawsuits 2019. You can see all kinds of articles on this. One thing that really stuck out with me is, well number one, Beyonce got sued because her website was not ADA compliant. Dominoes Pizza got sued. But there’s also a lot of small businesses getting sued as well. In one of these articles it actually said that over were 2,400 website lawsuits were filed in 2019. So somebody could come to your website, and if they’re visually impaired and they cannot find what they want on your website, they have the right to file a lawsuit and take you to court, and you don’t want to run into that.
What we’re doing here at Big West, for no extra charge to our clients, anybody that we built a website for that is currently hosting with us on our server, we actually found a cool little program I’m going to share with you that will make the website ADA compliant. Let’s look at an example of a recent website we did here, one that we just did with this pest control website. What you’ll see up here in the corner is a little symbol, a little icon. And we can fully customize the color and the shape and the size and all kinds of things with this little icon here.
Watch what happens when I click on this icon. It pops up all these options here so somebody can actually read the page. You can have it read, it will actually read the words on the page. You can change the contrast. Highlight the links. You can make the text bigger. You can make the text spacing bigger. You can stop animations. Make the fonts more legible, it’ll actually change the fonts. There’s all this little stuff that’s included with this program. And if you notice down here, it’s provided by userway.org. This is an organization, a nonprofit organization, that will actually allow you to put some code on your website and get the website ADA compliant to avoid any of these lawsuits. But not only avoid lawsuits. Think about it, you want to get as many qualified leads or prospects to your website, so anybody that comes and visits your websites, you’re hoping they will take action and do business with you. This will increase the chances of somebody with this disability, that is visually impaired, to actually be doing business with you. So it does two things. It’ll prevent lawsuits, but it’ll also help your business. It’ll help you get more clients, or at least increase the chances of you getting clients. There’s so many benefits to this.
And like I said, we are adding this to all the new websites and all the websites that are currently on our server, and we’re doing this January through March 2020. We’re going to be adding this to all the websites that we’ve done that are currently on our server. If you have not done a website with us, I highly recommend you talk to your web designer or you, yourself, if you want to do it yourself, go to userway.org and get this installed on your website. This is very important.
But like I said, no extra charge to our clients. This is something we’re taking care of for everybody that we work with. You don’t need to worry about it, you don’t need to contact us about it, unless you don’t, for some reason, want us to put this on your website, that’s the only reason you should contact us. Otherwise, just be aware that this will be being put on your website in the coming months, by April 1, 2020 we want to have every website on our server fully compliant.
It’s a little time consuming. It’s going to take a little bit. We’re going to start with our SEO clients first and then we’re going to work with everybody that’s on our server. But if you have any questions about that, of course, send me an email, Joe@BigWestMarketing.com, or you can always call our office and set up a free consultation. But like I said, this is very important to be ADA compliant with your website, keep yourself safe and make your website more accessible to more people.
