Does your website meet accessibility requirements?

If you manage a health care website, you need to know about accessibility and 508 compliance.

508 compliance refers to a law that requires any organization that receives federal funding (including through Medicare or Medicaid) to make their digital content accessible to people with disabilities.

What are the requirements?

To be 508-compliant, websites need to meet the standards set by the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).

WCAG has three levels: A, AA and AAA. Legally, your site needs to meet level AA requirements in WCAG 2.0 to be 508-compliant. Coffey currently builds sites to WCAG 2.1.

What this means exactly is a bit complicated. But, put simply, a compliant site is one that is understandable and usable by people, regardless of disability.

One important part of this is making sure the site works well when someone accesses it using a screen reader or another type of assistive technology.

How to make your website accessible

There’s a lot that goes into making a website accessible. But here are a few basic things you can do right now.

Write better link text.

Make your links easy to understand by keeping them specific. For example, use the name of the page in a link instead of “Click here” or a long, complex URL.

Include image alt text.

Alt text offers a description of an image that a screen reader can access. Good alt text is short and descriptive. Use it on important images. Skip it on purely decorative ones.

Use proper header sequence.

Screen readers use the hierarchy of page headers to navigate. Your largest header (usually the page title) should have an H1 tag. After that, you should use an H2 tag for your next largest header and so on. You should only have one H1 per page. You can use other header tags as much as you need.

Make accessibility part of your website plan.

Accessibility isn’t a one-time effort. Once you get your site up to the current standards, you’ll need to adjust processes to ensure that it stays there as it evolves. As part of this, it’s a great idea to have your site scanned regularly to look for any issues. (If Coffey hosts your site, we do this for you already.)

Building and maintaining a compliant website

When Iredell Health System chose Coffey as their website redesign partner, accessibility was an important reason. Starting with the initial design prototypes and continuing on through the site build, Coffey’s team made certain that every aspect of the new Iredell website met the rigorous 508 compliance and web accessibility standards set forth by WCAG 2.1 AA.

Because compliance and accessibility is an ongoing concern, Coffey scans the Iredell website frequently to find any new accessibility errors and correct them. The result is a website that stays accessible for all users as new content is added.