Ensuring Accessibility and Compliance
There are many practical reasons that you should ensure that your website and other digital content complies with the Americans with Disabilities Act by following the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.
ADA Compliance Increases Your Target Audience
ADA Compliance Improves Your SEO Efforts
ADA Compliance May Help Your Reputation
ADA Compliance Means Overall Better Website Usability
You Can Avoid Penalties
MessageSpring helps you effectively deliver messages to your diverse cultural audiences with language translations, text to speech, topic driven messages and multiple channel options. However, we also want to help you cater to your audiences who might have disabilities. Organizations interested in catering to people with disabilities should ensure that their content adheres to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 covers a wide range of recommendations for making Web content more accessible. Following these guidelines will make content accessible to a wider range of people with disabilities, including blindness and low vision, deafness and hearing loss, learning disabilities, cognitive limitations, limited movement, speech disabilities, photosensitivity and combinations of these. Following these guidelines will also often make your Web content more usable to users in general. Here are a few practical reasons.
As a MessageSpring customer, you are most likely aware that messages authored by you that are delivered by our platform via SMS and email can be viewed on micro-websites. We call these websites web messages. They look nice and are assembled with open graph protocol tags. However, unless we work together, people with certain disabilities may struggle to read the content that you write and we deliver.
So, please work with us to ensure that the content that you deliver via MessageSpring is both high quality and compliant with WCAG. When authoring, please keep these things in mind.
Translations
Proper Grammar – If you are sending messages to diverse audiences, please write your messages as grammatically correct as possible. Translations systems follow the “Garbage In – Garbage Out” paradigm.
Headings and Titles
Ensure all content uses relevant headers
Use headings correctly to organize the structure of your content
Use descriptive headers
Text and Font
All fonts should be accessible
Descriptive text for image elements
ALT TAG
Include proper alt text for images
Color Contrast
Use color with care
Additional Files
Include transcripts of video and other multimedia
Reduce use of video and multimedia
Avoid the use of PDF files
Additional Elements – Buttons, Hyperlinks, Forms
Design your forms for accessibility
Give your links unique and descriptive names
Tables
Use tables for tabular data, not for layout.
Check the accessibility of your messages using this tool https://www.accessibilitychecker.org by entering the URL of the messages that you send. To do this, just click on the Share icon and choose a language. The copied URL can be entered in the the above tool.
ADA Compliance Increases Your Target Audience
ADA Compliance Improves Your SEO Efforts
ADA Compliance May Help Your Reputation
ADA Compliance Means Overall Better Website Usability
You Can Avoid Penalties
MessageSpring helps you effectively deliver messages to your diverse cultural audiences with language translations, text to speech, topic driven messages and multiple channel options. However, we also want to help you cater to your audiences who might have disabilities. Organizations interested in catering to people with disabilities should ensure that their content adheres to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 covers a wide range of recommendations for making Web content more accessible. Following these guidelines will make content accessible to a wider range of people with disabilities, including blindness and low vision, deafness and hearing loss, learning disabilities, cognitive limitations, limited movement, speech disabilities, photosensitivity and combinations of these. Following these guidelines will also often make your Web content more usable to users in general. Here are a few practical reasons.
As a MessageSpring customer, you are most likely aware that messages authored by you that are delivered by our platform via SMS and email can be viewed on micro-websites. We call these websites web messages. They look nice and are assembled with open graph protocol tags. However, unless we work together, people with certain disabilities may struggle to read the content that you write and we deliver.
So, please work with us to ensure that the content that you deliver via MessageSpring is both high quality and compliant with WCAG. When authoring, please keep these things in mind.
Translations
Proper Grammar – If you are sending messages to diverse audiences, please write your messages as grammatically correct as possible. Translations systems follow the “Garbage In – Garbage Out” paradigm.
Headings and Titles
Ensure all content uses relevant headers
Use headings correctly to organize the structure of your content
Use descriptive headers
Text and Font
All fonts should be accessible
Descriptive text for image elements
ALT TAG
Include proper alt text for images
Color Contrast
Use color with care
Additional Files
Include transcripts of video and other multimedia
Reduce use of video and multimedia
Avoid the use of PDF files
Additional Elements – Buttons, Hyperlinks, Forms
Design your forms for accessibility
Give your links unique and descriptive names
Tables
Use tables for tabular data, not for layout.
Check the accessibility of your messages using this tool https://www.accessibilitychecker.org by entering the URL of the messages that you send. To do this, just click on the Share icon and choose a language. The copied URL can be entered in the the above tool.
Updated on: 03/07/2024
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