Regardless of your services, every website must comply with ADA and WCAG, the laws protecting disabled people online and offline. These accessibility legislations require you to ensure your website has no barriers preventing people with disabilities from using your services.
15% of the world’s population has disabilities obstructing their web use, which is why it’s hard to determine how you can alter your website to cater to nearly a billion people. Luckily, Accessibility Spark takes care of that task.
This revolutionary app allows everyone to view, navigate, and interact with your website by making it more accessible to those with blindness, motor and mobility, epilepsy, color blindness, blurred vision, cognitive disorders, aging, cataracts, and more.
If you’re already using Accessibility Spark, you’ve made the right choice. Here’s how you can further customize your website with the help of this plug-in.
What is the Accessibility Spark App?
Accessibility Spark is a Shopify app that you can plug into your store’s website to make it accessible for all customers. This app enforces ADA and WCAG 2.1, s508, and other accessibility legislations on your Shopify website.
Not only does this help your website reach more prospects, but it also protects your business from unnecessary legal expenses and lawsuits. The best part about Accessibility Spark is its five-minute easy implementation and setup, making your website accessible without any hassle. In addition, it provides an accessibility statement and certification of performance on your website.
The way it works is simple and effective:
- Install the Accessibility Spark Shopify application and access the accessibility interface on your website.
- Allow Accessibility Spark to scan and analyze your website.
- After identifying all accessibility issues within 48 hours, the plug-in will adjust your website to comply with ADA and WCAG standards.
- Accessibility Spark will automatically scan your website daily for consistent compliance for any new or added content, forms, images, videos, or widgets.
Best Customizations for our Accessibility Spark App
Accessibility Spark allows you to customize your Shopify website to perfectly adhere to all ADA and WCAG with the help of specific features that make the interface more scalable for disabled people.
Here are some of the best customizations you can include on your website using the Accessibility Spark app.
Invert Colors
Those with blurred vision or weak eyesight can find it hard to read the black-on-white text as the white majority can cause eye strain. However, by including an inverted colors option on your Shopify site, those that prefer white-on-black text can access it with just a button.
In addition, white screens aren’t a constant image. If you look close enough, you’ll find that it’s continually flickering. So the lesser white there is on the screen, the lesser flickering there is for you to notice. In such cases, inverted screens can be helpful for those with bad eyesight or photosensitive epilepsy.
Pause Animations
Those with photosensitive epilepsy may be triggered by flickering, flashing, or blinking content found on most websites to capture the visitor’s attention. In addition, websites with animated gifs, videos, SVGs, or PNGs and CSS, JavaScript, or Canvas animations can induce incapacitating physical reactions such as seizures and more.
To prevent this, you can make your Shopify website more accessible by allowing users to pause such animations. Accessibility Spark’s Pause Animations feature gives the visitor complete control over all content, even those that aren’t animated.
Text Size
It’s no secret that aged people and those with blurry vision or visual impairments have trouble reading smaller text. Giving users the liberty to adjust the text size on your Shopify store according to their preferences can make your website more accessible.
In addition, certain color combinations are readable for disabled audiences only in bigger or smaller text sizes. Therefore, instead of making the large text the standard setting for your website, you can allow visitors to change the size as they please.
The Text Size feature from Accessibility Spark isn’t just a considerate addition to your website; it’s a requirement in WCAG 2.0 level AA. Your website must have a “contrast ratio of 4.5:1 for normal text and 3:1 for large text (14 points and bold or larger, or 18 points or larger).”
Tooltip
Tooltips provide a preview of information over links, form fields, buttons, or other focusable elements on a website. Focus and hover elements trigger tooltips, remaining on the screen as long as the trigger is on focus.
To offer a more accessible version of tooltips on your website, allow your users to discover and read the tooltip with any mouse, pointing device, keyboard, zoom software, screen reader, or assistive technology.
Accessibility Spark’s customization helps you achieve such tooltips, along with ensuring that the tooltip’s information is only helpful and not crucial to operate the UI.
Text Spacing
Dyslexic people may have trouble reading words and letters that look too similar or are too close together, in which case, text spacing can come in handy. Allowing your users to control the text spacing on your Shopify store can make your content readable and your website accessible.
Adjusting the space between letters, words, lines, and paragraphs helps those with dyslexia to increase their reading space and ensure fewer interruptions while consuming content. In addition, those with cognitive disabilities can utilize this feature to discern sections and call out boxes.
Page Structure
Nearly all websites on the internet have page structures that are only easy to scale and discern for those without disabilities. For example, these websites may include content in larger paragraphs or with uncommon terms.
People with cognitive disorders such as autism, ADD/ADHD, or dyslexia may have trouble scaling such websites and comprehending their content. Accessibility Spark helps you present your content in a clear structure and hierarchy, making it easier to understand.
It may do so by sectioning your content into logical blocks, including whitespace or dividing lines to differentiate regions, providing headings, and other visual indicators to make the content more discernible. Not only is this feature accessible for those with cognitive disorders, but it also utilizes screen reading software.
Color Desaturation
WCAG 3.0 requires web developers to “provide sufficient contrast between foreground text and its background” for your website to be accessible. Websites with high saturation can be triggering as well as hard to read for those with visual impairments.
Normal vision has a 1% contrast sensitivity (CS) JND legibility level, while impaired vision might have a 3% CS or higher. Giving them the liberty to desaturate images or text helps them scale your website with much more ease, increasing your readability drastically.
Accessible Fonts
Most fonts used on the web aren’t accessible, featuring a size, color, and contrast that makes them hard to read for those with visual impairments or cognitive disorders. Accessible fonts are easy to read, have distinguishable letters, are not decorative, handwriting, custom, or cursive, and don’t slow the reader down.
Accessibility Spark’s Accessible Fonts customizes your Shopify store by replacing your current fonts with readable and disability-friendly fonts such as Tahoma, Helvetica, Verdana, Calibri, Arial, Arvo, Rockwell, Times New Roman, and Museo Slab.
Reading Guide
Reading guides allow screen readers and assistive technology to understand and relay the content on your website with the help of a sequential arrangement of your content in a PDF. As a result, the screen reader is able to relay the content as logically and accurately as possible.
WCAG 1.3.2 requires a reading guide or reading order for a website to be considered accessible. By including reading guides on your website, you open up your content and services for the blind or visually impaired.
Dark Contrast/Light Contrast
Low vision or colorblind users may have trouble navigating your website if it only offers the standard level of contrast. Such users require sufficient contrast between the text/graphic and the background. Typically, you may opt for maximum contrast to solve this issue, but black and white is often too overwhelming for visually impaired users.
You may offer other color options instead, such as navy, maroon, dark green, and pastels for lights. Most modern designs are too subtle to offer sufficient contrast for disabled users, offering combinations such as light grey/middle grey, middle pastels/darks, white/light cyan, etc.
Accessibility Spark acts as a color analyzer, ensuring your color palette is friendly for the disabled community.
Highlight Links
You may have noticed that most websites only offer a switch in color to differentiate between hyperlinks and normal text. Typically, the color is blue or purple on rare occasions. This makes it impossible for colorblind users to differentiate between hyperlinks and normal text.
Accessibility Spark keeps your website colorblind-friendly by highlighting links in various ways, such as underlining, darker background, etc.
Stay ADA & WCAG Compliant With Accessibility Spark
Keeping your inaccessible to people with disabilities doesn’t just decrease your conversion rate but also results in costly lawsuits. Every website should be easily scalable, but unfortunately, 98% of US-based webpages are not attainable for the disability community.
Luckily, you can help increase the web’s accessibility rate by using Accessibility Spark to comply with ADA and WCAG. Learn about their transparent pricing plans to find the perfect fit for your Shopify website.