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Any Plugin to make a site ADA Complaint?
Is there any plugin that will make a website ADA complaint? A company i work for got slapped with a lawsuit for not being ADA, they asked me to fix that. I am looking for an easy way to become ADA complaint without have to worry about redoing a whole site. I’ve never done this before.
I know there are plugins but does having a plugin make you compliment?
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The thing is, there’s not really a switch for ADA compliance. There are things you can do to bring it in line with WCAG guidelines, and things you can do that make it harder to be sued (these are usually the same things), but ADA compliance isn’t really a switch of “not compliant” <-|-> “is compliant”. You’ll notice that any legitimate plugins you can get will use very careful language to make sure they’re not saying you’ll be automatically compliant; this is why.
That all said, you can either scan your site with a tool that’ll give you a list of issues, which you’ll then manually fix (e.g., webAIM); or you can get a plugin that adjusts the site for you (e.g., userway). It sounds like the plugin route is your best bet right now, but be aware that a) they change your site’s colors/layout/etc, so you need to test really thoroughly; b) they only work as long as you keep the plugin installed, so be ready to be paying for that long-term unless you’re making fixes in the meantime; and c) they come with their own privacy issues, so check your implications under GDPR/CCPA so you don’t get slapped there.
No, there is no plugin that will make any arbitrary site ADA compliant, except perhaps the edge case plugin whose code is: `<?php die(“call us at 1-800-no-website”);`.
ADA compliance requires intentional decision making throughout the design and functionality of an entire site. No plugin is gonna be able to provide that, especially because WordPress is flexible enough to allow bad UX choices to be implemented anywhere, even places a plugin can’t effectively access.
Are there plugins that can help? Sure.
But the important part is becoming educated on the intent and implementation of the guidelines and/or hiring someone with that knowledge to help ensure your compliance.
Asking for a plugin to do the work would be like rolling into a mechanic’s and saying “I built my own car from the ground up. What fuel additive will make it pass California emissions tests?”
Accessibe is a premium service that audits your site, gives you feedback and has some quick fix toggles via plugin. However, ADA is a serious and necessary component that should, as previously mentioned, be considered at the planning stages of a website.
You can use aXe dev tools extension in Chrome to run audits so you know what to fix. I’m actually doing a follow-up audit for a massive project I completed earlier this year.
PageSpeed will provide some major pain points that need to be addressed on your site, as well.
If this is for a business site, get the audit started asap. You can get sued if your site isn’t 2.0 compliant.
I use Chrome’s DevTools, then run a Lighthouse report to see where the issues are. It’s free and gives you a good starting point to check things out before paying for a premium subscription.
Quite often it’s contrast issues, images with no descriptions, links with no titles, etc. Sometimes the score can improve significantly just by tweaking some minor things on a global basis, but sometimes it can be tedious to find ways to inject code in the functions.php or plugins to get the necessary elements in place.
If the site is older I’m sure it’s strewn with missing image description tags, and these are extremely tedious to update, but have to be done. At some point it might be simply worth rebuilding the site depending on how long it’s going to take.
Amazingly I find a lot of current plugins still don’t accommodate for ADA. I was trying to get a Spectra Blocks post grid block compliant (the image link doesn’t have a title), but gave up and used Content Views Pro, which at least provided some php code to automatically add a title to an image link.
Spectra is one of the biggest (maybe the biggest) block plugin, so it was surprising that they don’t automatically provide this in their code.