What we offer
At Properties Online we have partnered with UserWay to offer you an accessibility widget at a discounted monthly price. UserWay’s full AI-Powered Accessibility Widget accelerates the process of bringing your website into compliance with governmental regulations as required by the ADA by instantly remediating nearly all accessibility violations.
Example:
What does it mean to be web compliant?
What makes a website compliant, and what are the requirements? Compliant with what, and why? Who makes these decisions?
When you’re new to the world of accessibility, these may seem like basic questions with simple answers. They’re not.
It’s easy to get lost when you begin to work your way deeper into the details. Web accessibility is a highly technical field, regulated in various ways by countries of every size around the world. There is no single set of rules to follow. Rather, accessibility is an ever-changing landscape where the bar is constantly set higher, with the goal of achieving universal access for everyone.
Why comply?
Standards are followed not because we are legally required to, but because they are right and fair. Everyone should be able to access the web and that’s why Properties Online, Inc., has partnered with UserWay, a leading provider of web accessibility tools. When the UserWay widget has been added to your site you know that most or all user challenges that people complain of will be removed, clearing the way for greater and freer use and enjoyment of your site.
What makes a website compliant?
While there are many, many details to take into account, the overall aim is always to strive to ensure that all users can access your content, or at least the greatest number of users possible.
Consider the various disabilities that may interfere with access.
People who are blind or visually impaired will often be using screen readers. Can the majority of screen readers work with your content? Does your site have alt text? Do the important functions of your site present only visually, or have you provided alternative options?
For those who can see but perhaps need color-blindness functionality, or greater contrast, or larger text, or a different font: what options have you set up for their use?
People who are deaf or hard of hearing will need captioning and transcription for any audio or video with audio. And so forth. Clearly there are many, many considerations.
What compliance means: intent
At first, the regulatory environment may seem like a tangled mess of overlapping and sometimes contradictory laws, but there is a great deal of agreement on what compliance means. It comes down to the basic principles of POUR.
POUR is a four-letter acronym you’ll find a lot in the accessibility space. These high-level principles encompass functional accessibility: Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, and Robust.
Perceivable
We perceive things in the world via our senses. For users, the available senses in most spaces online or in tech are currently seeing and hearing, with touch at hand as well where haptics are included. New technologies may allow us to interface via touch, smell, or taste. Those would also be included in “perceivables”.
Operable
We operate controls, navigation, buttons, and other interactive elements in order to control an interface. When users can interact with an interface in this way, it is known as operability. Many users may identify elements visually and subsequently swipe or click. Other users will utilize voice commands or a keyboard.
Understandable
What makes something understandable? Consistency of format and presentation, and predictability of design and use patterns, are part of what makes technology reliable and easy to navigate. Multimodal and concise content that is tone and voice appropriate is also more understandable. When content is comprehensible to users, they’ll find the interface more available to them. They’ll learn to use it, and remember it without a great deal of trouble.
Robust
Is your IT designed to function on all relevant technologies? Does it comply fully with all necessary standards? Can users choose how they interact with your material online, i.e., documents, websites, multimedia, etc? If the answer is yes to all of the above, that is robust.
Principles such as POUR can apply to many situations, online and off. Although they were originally intended to describe accessibility on the web, they are clearly pertinent in other areas of accessibility. Anyone working in technology should provide users with the ability to access their technology via perception, operation, and understanding. All tech should work robustly across multiple platforms, and assistive technologies must be included in that list.
How do we make compliance easy?
Automated remediation based on a true and basic human desire to expand accessibility for all users is our starting point. The UserWay Accessibility Widget contains all the rules needed to adhere to global compliance standards, and is able to scan and remediate websites to bring them up to those high levels of compliance.
And, as compliance standards change, the widget changes with them: we constantly update it and are continually researching new and expanded definitions of and standards for accessibility.
Without this tool, organizations are left using web developers to hand-code updates across all pages on their websites, which, as might be expected, is generally a time-consuming and expensive process. It also leaves a lot of room for errors and omissions.
UserWay has moved beyond basic automation to ensure strict compliance. Since almost every website contains some custom code, a simple automation can’t interpret everything it scans. That’s why we developed an AI-powered accessibility widget that can decipher the structure of any site. It also writes grammatically-correct descriptions of the images it scans so screen readers can describe them to users who are visually-impaired. No other website compliance solution is more efficient, or more cost-effective.
The speed at which a website can be made compliant is also critical with regard to litigation.
As compliance guidelines turn into compliance laws, businesses of all sizes with non-compliant websites are being targeted by lawsuits. This is clearly a financial liability, and, importantly, it also harms sales numbers and downgrades the digital reputation of a company when a large percentage of site visitors can’t gain full access. Demonstrating the ability to quickly remediate all the pages on a site while also being responsive to people with disabilities is the safest way to avoid financial losses and lengthy court cases.
Add the Accessibility Widget to an EXISTING website for only $44/Month.
Please complete this form and a representative will contact you to set up your accessibility widget.