Your Insurance Agency Website and ADA Accessibility Lawsuits
By now, many of us have seen the warnings from the Big I and others about the growing number of ADA-based website accessibility lawsuits. On the one hand, the Department of Justice has yet to promulgate any guidelines, so how big a concern can those lawsuits be to an insurance agency? On the other hand, the growth in ADA related lawsuits is real...and potentially expensive and time consuming.
A number of defendants in Federal ADA-related lawsuits were ordered to perform technical updates to their websites using Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.0) as a guide, in lieu of DOJ guidelines. You can apply the same guidelines to your insurance agency website as a preventative measure.
Confluency has reviewed 322 insurance agency websites and found that over 90% of them run afoul of the WCAG 2.0 guidelines often enough to be of concern. Some of the websites contain nearly two dozen guideline violations on the website home page alone.
The websites with the most violations were generally those, that at first blush, had what many of us might refer to as an 'attractive design'. The problem is that attractive isn't always accessible to someone with vision impairments. The design missteps took many shapes but the two most often occuring transgressions came in the area of contrast and image labeling.
Color Rush, Your Insurance Agency Website, and ADA Accessibility
It's easy to look at a website, a painting, or a sculpture and say, 'I like that'. That's OK for paintings and sculptures, beauty is in the eye of the beholder after all. But websites aren't works of art, they are built to do something, to provide information to a user and design can help or hinder access to that information. Attractive website designs may be visually pleasing but they may also put your insurance agency at risk for an ADA website accessibility lawsuit.
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Back on a Thursday night in November of 2015, the New York football Jets took on the Buffalo Bills in a game that was part of the National Football League's 'Color Rush' promotion. During these games each team's uniforms would be a solid color rather than the typical white/color combination sported by at least one team. Some observers of this game thought the game looked like Christmas, as the Jets wore green uniforms and the Bills sported all red. But to a not trivial number of viewers it looked like a newspaper, and not the Sunday comics.
About 13 million people are color blind and one of the hardest color combinations to differentiate for those with color-blindness is red/green. Instead of eleven green clad players vying with eleven red uniformed players, to the vision impaired the game looked like a confusing jumble of 22 gray jersied athletes running around on a football gridiron. Many 'attractive' website designs have similar contrast issues. Solving these may be as simple as changing a few color combinations on a few web pages..but it could require a substantial website redesign.
Robots Can't 'See' Your Agency Website (at least not yet)
We have all been irritated by the security challenges on websites like Ticketmaster or maybe even your own insurance agency website. CAPTCHA, an acronym for 'completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart' (say that ten times fast!) has long been used to keep spam bots away from email addresses or to keep scalpers from buying a block of concert tickets. CAPTCHA is based on the idea that web crawlers, or bots, cannot 'see' and identify images but a human eye can.
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Individuals with vision impairments may employ a text reader, which is basically a software program that will crawl text on a web page and convert that text to audio. But text readers, just like spam bots challenged by CAPTCHA, can't see images. In order for an image to be visible to a text reader it has to be tagged with a description.
If an image isn't integral to the information on a web page you might view that as a fairly minor error and something that wouldn't put your insurance agency website at the center of an ADA accessibility lawsuit. On the other hand, we might say, 'why run the risk?' The safer thing would be to include tags for all the images on your website.
Sometimes images are really important and convey information in and of themselves. A lack of image tags in this case is not trivial ADA accessibility error. Retailers in particular have this issue - are those pants blue, red or black? Sometimes insurance websites have this problem as well; if you use graphics on your website that are the gateway to important information, such as locating areas of coverage or risk around a home or office, you may need to think about reengineering those graphics.
Videos, by their very nature, pack in a lot of information and require more than a tag. For videos it's safer to include a video transcript along with any video you may have available on your agency website. If you are using You Tube to host your videos there is a transcription option to make that easier.
Odds are your agency website has some WCAG 2.0 guideline infractions, especially if your website was designed over six months ago, when ADA related lawsuits became a big topic in the insurance industry. Our advice is to run an audit of your agency website against the WCAG 2.0 guidelines. It may turn out that some minor tweaking is all you need. If you aren't sure where to start with an audit we can help.