Web Accessibility in Different Countries – What is the Best Accessibility Test?

Web Accessibility in Different Countries - What is the Best Accessibility Test?

Web Accessibility becomes crucial in today’s digital marketing age especially with the increase in the number of the disabled population over the past few decades. This because you need to ensure that people with all kinds of disabilities like vision impairment, hearing problems, cognitive impairment, motor impairment, etc. are comfortably able to access and explore your website to maximum efficiency. If this is not done, then you face two major problems.

One is that since you violate the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.1) laid down by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3G), it triggers punishment that can in the worst-case scenario ban your website, and the other one is that you will definitely lose a considerable amount of organic traffic of potential user base with disabilities to your website. To ensure these problems won’t arise, you must optimize your website for web accessibility.

Web Accessibility and its implications in different countries

In layman’s terms, web accessibility means making your website accommodative for use by differently abled user base with complete or partial disabilities. It has binding implications in most of the countries, only degree and manner of legality differs. If your website is operational in certain countries, you need to know the legal framework for digital marketing. Therefore, Following are some countries with their web accessibility laws:

     1) Australia: Australian Government has made it mandatory for all the websites originating or operational in Australia to strictly adhere by the WCAG 2.1. To ensure maximize compliance, the Government has included this mandate in the Disability Discrimination Act, 1992 in Australia.

     2) USA: There’s a separate Section 508 in US Constitution which has been devoted to website accessibility for people with disabilities which serves as a standard in all cases and requires all websites in the United States to follow WCAG 2.1 guidelines. For instance, A Case Law of January 2017, Winn Dixie Inc. vs. the Florida Federal Court, involved the court providing decision against Winn Dixie Inc. because its website wasn’t optimized for use by vision impaired users of United States.

     3) European Countries which are members of EU: Countries belonging to the European Union need to follow the CWAG guidelines as per the directive 2016/2102 issued by the European Parliament. The deadline for compliance by European websites existing before 23rd September 2019 is 23rd September 2020, and for new websites, it is from 23rd September 2019 itself.

There are several tests to optimize web accessibility, but it becomes difficult to implement these tests manually all by yourself. Therefore, you can use the services of digital marketing from many companies.

Conclusion

Web accessibility is thus important for legal compliance in countries like Australia, Canada, European Union countries, the United States, etc. Therefore, you must ensure that you follow the CAR 2. (https://tabsnation.com/) 1 guidelines given by W3C while developing and designing your website. To ensure maximum compliance with CWAG guidelines, you can do various tests like Contrast test, Alt Text Test, Captions Test, Transcript Test, etc.

To get more information on web accessibility in various countries, you can continue reading our other blogs. Stay tuned to us for more related information.

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