Website Accessibility Management
Website Accessibility Design
At EnlightWorks, we believe our clients' websites should be accessible to everyone. We have undergone extensive accessibility training, consulted with disability access consultants, and use proven accessibility guidelines and tools to deliver an accessibility service included with our managed website services that lets our clients' website visitors know they care about website accessibility.
When we build new websites, we design and develop them with accessibility in mind. We also offer ongoing accessibility management within our regular Managed Performance plans and standalone Managed Accessibility Website plans.
There are dozens of ways to approach website accessibility. There are overlay solutions that promise your website will be accessible with one piece of code, and there is the manual process of ensuring the website code is built based on web accessibility standards and best practices provided by the Americans with Disabilities Act, Section 508, and Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.0, WCAG 2.1, WCAG 2.2).
Our approach is to use something other than overlays, as they can interfere with people already using assistive technology to access websites and create even more accessibility barriers. We instead build into our web design process the best practices for accessible website design and have learned how to create websites that are both accessible and attractive to our clients' target audience.
With accessibility in mind, we ensure that our clients' websites provide equal access to all visitors, communicates their dedication to digital accessibility, and offer their visitors a way to contact them or us if they have trouble accessing their websites so that we can do our best to fix any accessibility errors they are experiencing.
Ongoing Accessibility Management
Accessible Web Design Process
We know that most agencies do not consider accessible design in their web development process, which leads to the development of inaccessible websites. We have developed steps in our web design process to help build the foundation for each website to meet the requirements of ADA compliance as much as possible. Without the use of an overlay, our platform has built-in ADA tools that help guide us when designing along the way, making sure we are using color correctly by grading how we are designing based on WCAG standards conformance levels, such as Level AA and Level AAA.
Automated Testing & Remediation
Once a website is live, we begin monitoring it with our automated website accessibility management platform, built on the WAVE platform. This tool allows us to look for accessibility problems like low contrast, empty links, missing form labels, images without the proper alt text, and more. We then fix any accessibility errors or warnings our automated testing finds and provide reporting to our clients every month.
Manual Accessibility Testing
Then, every quarter or every six months, depending on your plan, we will manually go through our client's top 5 visited web pages and perform manual keyboard navigation testing and testing with a screen reader to check for any manual accessibility errors and ensure their websites conform to accessible technical standards. Manual testing ensures a website is more accessible and helps improve the user experience. Our manual testing includes checking for the impact of low-contrast content, the presence and prevalence of animations and movement, keyboard focus indicators, reviewing any digital content on the website, and more.
Accessibility Statements
For every website on a managed website plan, we will add a website accessibility statement and an accessibility guidance statement for visitors who may not be using assistive technologies to access the website. The goal of these statements is to assure our clients' visitors that they are doing everything they can to ensure their websites are accessible to everyone and offer ways to get support if they run into any trouble.
Accessibility Report
After our automated and manual testing, we provided reports on the automated and manual accessibility errors we found and fixed. Our reports provide information on how your website measures against WCAG compliance and what we have done to fix any website accessibility errors.
Who Could Benefit From Our Accessibility Management Services
- Local Government Agencies and other smaller government websites
- Nonprofits concerned with accessibility
- Housing Agencies funded by the Federal Government
- A wide variety of other businesses that would like to get more business from everyone who accesses their website
- Other websites that need to comply with the new European Accessibility Act
