How to Make Your Ecommerce Website ADA compliant on a Budget.

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This video was created for small business and ecommerce owners who want to avoid lawsuits regarding having an ADA compliant website...or for those who have already been sued.

There are plenty of services out there who will make your site compliant, however lots of these will charge you upwards of $30,000 to do it. For a small business owner, having to spend this sort of money could put you out of business, as could a lawsuit.

Unfortunately for me, I was unaware that ADA compliance for websites was even a thing, so I had to learn these things the hard way. I was forced to find the cheapest way out of a lawsuit.

While I can't give you legal advice, I can let you know what I did that should at least get your website off of the radar of the predatory, blood-sucking lawyers who are going after websites. There are so many websites they can go after, so making yours less attractive than others should help.

The immediate thing you should do is to put an accessibility statement in the footer of the website with a link to a web page that has more info. You can Google "website accessibility statement" to find out what to put in it. But essentially you want to let people know you are committed to making your website accessible and to give people a way to contact you if they need help. This will already put you well ahead of most websites out there.

As a note, even if your shopping cart hosting provider claims to have ADA-compliant templates, there is a good chance they are not. I use Shift4Shop, formerly 3Dcart, and they claim their templates are compliant. However, if you use any of their feature module addons, they add non-compliant issues. Also, the templates have contrast errors that make them fail basic testing. Worse than those, the checkout pages were totally non-compliant and this is the worst place to have a non-compliance since a blind person with a screen reader software will not be able to place an order. I ended up hiring someone to fix these two pages since I could not get Shift4Shop to fix them. That only cost me $50.

Even if your choosen template is compliant, changes you make to the colors and design can add non-compliances, so you need to test everything.

Speaking of testing, there are some low cost or free tools you can get to find out what issues you have. The first tool is WebAIM's free WAVE page tester. They have free extensions for the Chrome and Firefox browsers. You can get the extension by going to wave.webaim.org. You can test a page directly on the website, but I recommend going to the Browser Extension tab and installing an extension tool so you can simply right click on any page and quickly test it.

To use to use the Wave Browser testing tool you simply right click your mouse button on any page and select "WAVE this page". You will then get a report on errors like this one. Ironically this is the ADA accessibility statement for the United States District Court Southern District of New York where many of these lawsuits are tried. Even they're not compliant, yet they pass judgement on others!

The one issue with the free WAVE tool is that it only tests one page at time. There are low-cost tools you can buy that test the entire site at once so you can see a list of all the problems. These tools also test to a greater level than the WAVE tool. It may find things that you have no control over fixing, but the more issues you can fix, the safer you'll be. One tool I used is the SortSite Desktop tool from PowerMapper.

To find someone who can help you with fixing your website, you could use Google to search "website accessibility", but you'll most likely find companies who will charge $10K-30 thousand dollars. There are much cheaper options by finding an outsourcer in a foreign country. There are people in other countries that have the necessary training to get your website compliant. Click on the link in the description for the website I used to find someone to make my all my pages pass the WAVE testing tool.

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