Website accessibility is no longer optional – it’s a necessity.
Truly, if your business is “open to the public” via its website, the law says it must be ADA compliant.
If you are thinking about ignoring this reality, you should know there is now a cottage industry of drive-by attorneys who send demand letters to companies whose sites aren’t compliant. Good times.
This is why you’re noticing little blue circles on more websites lately. These are plugin applications that allow a vision impaired visitor to manipulate the colors, fonts and other features of your site in ways that make it more legible to that person.
We recently addressed ADA compliance on our own website and have done so with a tool many readers might find useful – particularly based on cost.
You see, many of the “leading” plugin providers like EqualWeb, Accesibe, and UserWay, price their services identically – starting at $500/year and quickly going up from there for larger businesses. These solutions work but at the same time have frankly always felt to me like a bit of a grift (personal opinion!).
For most businesses, $500 of course isn’t a huge deal in the scheme of things, but it is an annoyance – one that I suspect causes too many companies to put off ADA compliance. This is why we were glad to have found an incredibly low-cost alternative that delivers on functionality: OneTap (https://wponetap.com/). Here’s a 30-second clip with the rundown:
Instead of $500/year, OneTap is available for a one-time purchase of just $69 and it has been garnering rave reviews for its effectiveness and ease of use. The core functionality aims to address key requirements for making a site more accessible, which is indeed a nice thing for that vision impaired visitor who may occasionally find your website.
Better yet, installation is incredibly simple and requires no coding. It took just minutes to enable it on our site and has worked well in the few weeks it has been up.
If you have never used one of these tools, by the way, just click the blue icon at the bottom-left of the page you’re on right now. It’s quite interesting to see how the tool instantly manipulates the site to create higher contrast, enlarge fonts, underline all links or apply other adjustments based on a visitor’s particular needs.
Now, there is one important caveat: currently, OneTap is only available for websites built on the WordPress platform. Because over half of all U.S. websites are, however, I’m hoping this post will be helpful to a lot of our readers.
If you’re unsure whether your website is built on WordPress, you can find out in seconds by visiting the following site and entering your company’s url: https://www.isitwp.com
On a related note, if you’re curious about all the different tools and applications running on your website, you can visit https://builtwith.com and enter your organization’s URL. You will quickly see detailed breakdown of your site’s full technology stack. As an aside, it’s a great way to see how a competitor might have built a feature you admire, as well.
While we’ve had a great experience with OneTap, it’s important to do your own homework to determine if the OneTap application meets your specific needs and makes your website sufficiently ADA compliant for your business.
Last thing: we are not an affiliate of OneTap, and we don’t receive any compensation for recommending it (or any other solution we might write about here).
We simply found it to be a useful and cost-effective solution for our own site and wanted to share the tip with others who might either be unaware of ADA requirements or have put off addressing them because doing so feels a bit like chewing on tinfoil.
We get it.
But for just $69, there’s really no longer an excuse to leave this risk in place on your company’s website.
Hope this tip is helpful for your business!
