Accessbot- a tool to facilitate a developer’s job!

In recent times, many companies have started realizing the risks associated with the failure to comply with website accessibility standards. These risks can add up to greater costs than government fines or civil litigation. Apart from this, your brand will also suffer inevitable damage since persons with disabilities represent a growing demographic. At least 20% of the population has a disability, and with increasing life expectancy, an aging customer base means more and more of your company’s website visitors will have physical limitations. It is unlikely that this trend will decline, and the voice of persons with disabilities is gaining momentum. Companies that willfully ignore the needs of this demographic are sure to suffer damage to their brands and reputation. Moreover, the lack of an accessible web experience brings with it other problems like missing out on opportunities to gain more customers and increase revenue. If your company is one of the first in your industry to become web-accessible, you can win customers and easily reap the increasing numbers of persons with disabilities who couldn’t use your competitors’ inaccessible websites. Accessibility is doable, and it’s less costly than taking the risk of willful inaccessibility. To combat these inefficiencies, RioGlobal has developed an easy and convenient method to ensure that your website and its content remain Section 508 compliant, regardless of how many changes you make.

The sheer brilliance of Accessbot

It is a general belief that it's easier to incorporate accessibility knowledge on the design front in the beginning than it is on the development front. Many websites made a long time ago, though currently optimized with web accessibility features, are still laden with numerous violations and, consequently, have low compliance scores. Furthermore, several organizations choose to partner with a company that can provide continuous testing services. Some organizations are simply too small to have a dedicated IT staff, while others are too large to want to undertake accessibility testing on their own. This is where RioGlobal comes in. RioGlobal is the trusted partner of choice for many companies. We track changes in accessibility laws and regulations and provide continuous monitoring of all your web pages. Our proprietary Accessbot is an ISO 205010:2011 certified accessibility tool. Accessbot, with its easy-to-use dashboard interface, provides an appealing solution in a matter of seconds. Accessbot lists out all the violations found along with where they were located in the page source. Along with the severity of the violation and the issue description, our product also provides suggestions for remediation. Additionally, it helps you find Section 508 and WCAG accessibility violations in your web applications. t's easy to use, well documented, and available as either an on-prem or cloud solution. Web accessibility through a government-mandated policy still carries incredible scope for organizations to revolutionalize their way of business and build their brand image. If one thinks about it, things that a company does to improve accessibility to help disabled people help everybody. Everybody is "temporarily disabled" at least some of the time. By improving contrast to help partially-sighted people, you also just made your site much easier to read for somebody with perfect vision who happens to be looking at your site on a shiny phone screen outside on a sunny day. By adding captions to videos for deaf people, you also actually improved engagement for people with perfect hearing who happen to have their phone on mute in the library. Accessibility is not only a way for differently-abled people to use the internet, but also a means for brands to increase their efficiency, customer satisfaction, and overall image.

Tips for companies to make more accessible websites:

• Unique page titles, descriptive link texts. and alt images tag will enhance search engine optimization.
• If you have an E-commerce site then optimizing for screen readers can improve conversion rates.
• Adding captions to videos for deaf people
• Good color contrast between text and backgrounds of webpages
• Ensure Easily Accessible Content
• Use Headers to Structure Your Content Correctly
• Enable Resizable Text That Doesn’t Break Your Site
• Make JavaScript widgets accessible with the keyboard.