Designing an ADA Compliant Healthcare website

1. Designing an ADA Compliant Healthcare website Since there are no rules about what "ADA compliance" means for healthcare websites right now, the best thing to do is fix any problems with accessibility on your site. Accessibility on the web is not a one-time project. It's a task that never ends, just like SEO and performance. Every time you make changes or add new content, you'll need to follow these best practices. It's helpful to work with designers and developers who know these rules.

2. Web Accessibility Best Practices for Doctors 1. Consistent Navigation When making a new healthcare website, you usually go through a strategy process to find a healthcare website navigation that is both easy to use and complete. The navigation menu is an important part of how people use your site as a whole. Visitors use the navigation as a road map to get where they want to go on the site and find what they are looking for. It's important for web accessibility that the menu stays the same across the whole site. The navigation also helps meet the WCAG requirement of having more than one way to do something. This means that a visitor can get to a healthcare website page in more than one way. As a rule of user experience (UX) design, you'll often put links to important pages all over the home page. This helps because most people will automatically scroll when they land on the page. Visitors will find it easier to find the important pages on your site if the menus are clear and easy to use. You should also give each web page in the navigation a name that tells visitors what they can expect to see on the page.

3. 2. Alternative Text Alt text, which stands for "alternative text," is one of the most important parts of making a healthcare website accessible. People who use screen readers and other assistive technology to look at your healthcare website rely on the alternative text descriptions to understand the pictures on your healthcare website pages. When it comes to SEO, you'll often hear the terms "alt text" or "alt tags." This is because search engines also use alternative text to figure out what an image is for. WCAG gives rules for when alternative text should be added to images. If an image on a healthcare website page is just for decoration and doesn't add any information, you don't need to add an alternative text. If the image is useful or gives context to the content, it's best to include an alt text that describes the image for people who use assistive technology. You could also have images that link to a different page on your site. For example, if you have a call-to-action image in a blog post and clicking on it takes the reader to a page with a form or service, the alt text should explain how this works. If you leave out these parts, some people won't know that the images serve two purposes. Most healthcare websites today are built on a content management system like WordPress, which makes it easy to add the alternative text to each image as you add it to the site.

4. 3. Keyboard Navigation Some visitors may need to use their keyboard instead of a mouse to move around the healthcare website. Even though all sites should be built so that they can be navigated with a keyboard, it's very common for them to have quality control problems and other barriers. When a user moves the keyboard focus to a certain object and can't move to another element, this is called a "keyboard trap." When testing keyboard navigation, start by going through your menu and making sure a visitor can use all of the elements, drop-down menus, and buttons in the top navigation. Your developer or team of developers should also make sure that focus styling is there. This means that when a visitor tabs from one element to another, they will see a clear outline of the element that is in focus at the moment.

5. 4. Color Contrast People with poor eyesight or even color blindness need to know and follow the best practices for color contrast. The WCAG 2.1 says that the contrast between the color of the background and the color of the text should be at least 4.5:1. A 3:1 contrast ratio can be used for bigger text. You can compare different color combinations on your site with WebAim's Color Contrast Checker. Color contrast is also a good UX design practice because you want calls to action and key messages to stand out.. A good web designer will make sure that the different parts of the site and the text stand out well from each other. But it can be hard to meet the WCAG ratio levels across the whole site, especially if the colors you use for your brand don't have different tones. In this case, you might want to add a visual toolbar to the site that users can use to change the contrast themselves. With the free One Click Accessibility plugin for WordPress, you can add a simple widget that has these tools.

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