How Do Digital Consultancies Handle ADA Compliance?

Accessible digital spaces are essential to creating a fairer and more inclusive world for people with disabilities. With 1 in 6 people globally living with a significant disability (and more with temporary and undiagnosed disabilities), satisfying web accessibility guidelines is not an edge case — it’s an imperative.

At a federal level, the U.S.’s answer to this is the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990. ADA prohibits discrimination against people with disabilities in a number of ways, including exclusion of access. In more recent years, the ADA’s purview has extended to include digital spaces — though how ADA applies to sites and digital services isn’t entirely straightforward.

As a digital consultancy, we at Palantir are committed not only to helping our clients understand the relevant compliance frameworks, but also to advocating for the highest standards of digital accessibility. Regulatory compliance makes good business sense, but more importantly, it supports the 1.6 billion people worldwide affected by disabilities.

In this guide, we’ll walk you through how we as a digital consultancy handle ADA compliance. We’ll cover the basics of the relevant legal frameworks, illuminate the fundamentals of accessibility, and guide you through our holistic approach. For more insights on improving accessibility within your organization, browse our accessibility resources collection, or contact us for tailored support.

Key accessibility legal frameworks

ADA compliance is more complex than it first appears. While the original law focused on the physical world, later rulings have expanded its scope. The Department of Justice (DoJ) and federal courts determined that the ADA applies equally to digital entities, and in 2010, the DoJ passed the ADA Standards for Accessible Design, which encompasses “electronic and information technology”.

Currently, no legally mandated standard dictates the specific accessibility measures all businesses must follow online. However, judges in federal accessibility cases have consistently referred to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). Developed by the World Wide Web Consortium, WCAG provides standards designed to make the web accessible for people with sensory, intellectual, learning and physical disabilities.

Federal agencies and their contractors are also legally obliged to meet the accessibility standards of WCAG 2.0 A/AA, under Section 508 — a 2017 amendment of the 1973 Rehabilitation Act. Several states, such as California, also have their own accessibility bills that mandate WCAG compliance.

What does ADA compliance in the digital space entail?

Following relevant case law, the best practice for adhering to ADA in the digital space is to follow the WCAG standards.

While the exact guidelines vary across WCAG versions, they all center on four core principles:

• Perceivable. Content must be presented in a way that’s perceivable to a broad range of visitors, including those with sensory difficulties. This includes providing alt text descriptions for visual content, captions and descriptions for video content, making text resizable, and maintaining a color contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1.
• Operable. Visitors must be able to navigate and interact with your website. Operable sites are navigable by keyboard, have clear and descriptive page titles, and give visitors the ability to pause, stop, and hide content that moves, such as image carousels.
• Understandable. Visitors must be able to understand the content that’s being provided, how to navigate it, and what inputs are expected from them. Using clear and simple text is crucial to this, as is clearly labeling input fields, and keeping content structures consistent across different pages of your website.
• Robust. Your site must have strong compatibility with different technologies. Early WCAG versions focused on assistive technologies such as screen readers. WCAG 2.1 introduced 17 new guidelines concerning compatibility with mobile devices and tablets.

Most legal frameworks and federal rulings in the U.S. use WCAG 2.0 with A/AA compliance levels (low to mid-range conformance) as their benchmark. Regardless of legal mandates, we recommend following the most up-to-date accessibility frameworks. Not only does this cover you in terms of compliance in the future, it also makes your content accessible to as many users as possible.

ADA and WCAG: Key practices for ensuring digital accessibility

When it comes to actually putting accessibility standards into practice, we use techniques documented by The A11y Project: a community-driven initiative to open up tools and education around accessibility. For those looking to get started with accessibility, they also provide training and an excellent accessibility checklist.

Our approach to accessibility is holistic, tackling compliance from multiple angles. We help our partners build websites that not only meet standards but also deliver enjoyable, user-friendly experiences for people of all abilities.

• Audit and review. We review company brand guidelines and static designs for potential accessibility issues — including color contrast, asset size and resizing options, and consistency of content structure.
• Selecting the right tools. We draw heavily from The A11y Project’s list of recommended tools and resources. We also build in Drupal, which provides a whole host of accessibility features out of the box. All of Drupal’s core features are also compliant with WCAG 2.0 AA as standard.
• Manual A11y testing. During style guide development, we use a suite of accessibility extensions including Chrome Accessibility Developer Tools and WAVE toolbar in Firefox on individual rendered pages.
• User testing. The most effective way to assess accessibility is through user testing. We conduct user research and usability tests, both virtual and in-person, including tests with people who rely on assistive technologies.
• Automated, continuous testing. We use automated testing tools to detect potential accessibility issues, and code that fails these tests is never merged. We also work with Gulp Accessibility, which uses AccessSniff and HTML Codesniffer to grade the site’s accessibility using the different levels of the WCAG 2.0 standard.

An accessibility review of this scale typically requires input and buy-in from multiple departments within an organization, making collaboration with a digital consultancy particularly useful. Not only do we provide expertise in every facet of accessibility compliance, we also offer project coordination, oversight, and continuous delivery beyond a project’s initial output.

Are digital consultancies responsible for ADA compliance?

The short answer is no—organizations are ultimately responsible for their own ADA compliance. In order to be fully compliant, your website’s code, design, and content must comply with the relevant accessibility standards. As a digital consultancy, we build websites that are ADA compliant in their fundamental design and code, and set you up for compliance — but responsibility for content compliance, as well as adhering to design guidelines and following coding best practices, remains with the organizations we work with. For example, we create websites that allow you to easily add alt-text to images, but it’s up to your content managers to ensure that field is completed for each image they upload. For more guidance, read our comprehensive guide to creating accessible content.

We provide the framework and basis for accessible web experiences — but accessibility is an ongoing commitment. Ensuring that all of your content is perceivable, operable, understandable and robust is down to you.

Beyond ADA: Accessibility is more than a box to be checked

It’s easy to forget when we’re discussing ADA compliance that these frameworks profoundly affect how many people access and navigate your organization’s digital services. Approaching accessibility thoughtfully and rigorously doesn’t just solve potential legal headaches; it sets you up to create digital experiences that are easy to use and enjoyable for the widest range of visitors.

As a digital consultancy, we at Palantir provide comprehensive support and oversight for accessibility compliance projects. Through research, design, coding and user testing, we offer organizations a strong foundation for their ongoing commitment to digital accessibility, and for meeting — and exceeding — ADA compliance standards. If you’d like to learn more about how we can help your organization rise to the challenge of accessibility, get in touch.