The American with Disabilities Act (ADA) did not have any provisions for digital accessibility during its thirty years of existence. That is why businesses did not bother about making websites accessible to people with disabilities for a long time. Rather they considered AI-powered accessibility solutions.
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has been providing guidelines to make sites accessible for more than a decade.
AI powered.
In recent times, several users and organizations have realized the need to make websites accessible as well, which has given rise to many lawsuits. In the initial period, business owners argued that no law says websites must be accessible to users with disabilities.
However, several courts and legal bodies in America and all over the world have determined that websites are an extension of business premises on the internet.
According to Article III of the ADA, any public place of a business must be accessible to everyone, including people living with disabilities. So any business website that is not optimized for accessibility can get an ADA demand letter or face an expensive lawsuit.
AI Accessibility Versus Web Development
Businesses often shied away from optimizing their website for accessibility and risked a lawsuit because it was a cumbersome and expensive process.
Companies had to hire a web developer who needed to audit the website and make the necessary changes. Web developers and designers charged a substantial amount of fees.
Moreover, the website would be under maintenance for quite some time, which meant additional losses for the business. But for the last couple of years, organizations can take advantage of AI-powered solutions that can automatically make any existing website accessible.
Some companies provide solutions that audit the website and make all the necessary changes within 48hrs of implementation. That means organizations do not have to incur any revenue loss while their website is getting optimized. Plus, AI-powered solutions cost a fraction of what businesses had to pay for accessible web development.
The solutions implemented by the AI software are in accordance with the latest Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.1) set forth by the W3C.
The software ensures that the website meets the various criteria of the guidelines so that it becomes ADA and WCAG 2.1 compliant.
To get familiar with the daily developments within web accessibility, you can follow companies like accessiBe and Level Access on Twitter who are leading the web accessibility solutions industry.
How Does AI Make a Website Accessible?
AI software often adds a few lines of JavaScript to the website programming to make it accessible. However, these few lines of coding are capable of rectifying almost every barrier that people with disabilities can face.
The software runs in the background and makes the various elements of the website accessible.
These are some of the challenges that AI software can solve so that business websites become WCAG 2.1 and ADA compliant.
Improving Compatibility With Assistive Devices
People with disabilities often use assistive technologies like screen readers that rely on keyboard use. The AI-powered solution makes the website compatible with such devices so that users with disabilities can access the website.
The software optimizes the website navigation to become compatible with these devices, including functionalities like navigation, drop-down menus, forms, skip-navigation, and several others.
Optimizing the Content for Accessibility
The AI-powered software optimizes the content according to the need of the user with a disability. These are some of the automatic adjustments made to the website to make it accessible:
Virtual keyboard compatible with assistive devices
Automatically Adding Alternative Text Descriptions
Traditionally, web developers added alternative text or alt-text descriptions to the HTML coding of images to make them compatible with assistive devices because the visually impaired cannot see them.
The information given in the alt text would be relayed by a device like a screen reader. But with the help of AI image recognition, the software can analyze the image and relay the information to a blind user even if there is no alt text present in the HTML coding of the website.
Optimizing Security Features With Facial Recognition
Facial recognition was first implemented by Apple to unlock iPhones, but it took them a few years to perfect the technology. These days, AI software can use facial recognition to circumvent the security features of a website like CAPTCHA because people with disabilities face a lot of problems with it.
AI software also uses facial recognition for assistive devices that are used by people who can only move their heads.
Automatic Generation of Closed Captions
People who are deaf or hard of hearing have problems understanding the video or media files present on a website. AI solutions can understand lip movements to recognize the speech and generate the captions or transcripts automatically.
Research has shown that AI speech recognition is 34.2% more accurate than humans who are expert at lip-reading. So if the captions are missing on a media file, AI software can generate them to make it accessible.
Several organizations have started trusting AI software over conventional accessibility solutions because they have seen the benefits first-hand. They not only can save a company from lawsuits by making the website ADA compliant but also have several other advantages over using web developers to optimize websites.
Businesses using AI solutions have also realized that there is a lot of potential revenue to gain by making their websites accessible.
