ADA Laws affect how we must build and maintain our district websites. The deadline for a district of our size (less than 50,000 residents) is April 20th 2027. Unfortunately, these new rules will require more work on your part when adding content to the website. 

If the district is found out of compliance with the law after the deadline, we will be fined $75,000 for a first offense, and $150,000 for subsequent offenses. The sooner you start implementing these changes, the less work you'll have to do to get old content up to code. Please keep in mind these rules are not imposed by the tech department or district administrators, its a federal law.

Required Changes

Anyone editing the website or adding content to the resource page must keep the following in mind. Additionally,  schools must make sure previously added content meets these standards. For an exhaustive list ADA requirements, check out Finalsite's full list of ADA requirements, or the DOJ's document outlining the new rule.

Text Standards

Text Color

Any and all text on the website must pass AAA standards for color contrast legibility. WebAIM has an online checker for color contrast. Input the text hex value and background hex value, and it will tell you if your text is compliant.

Headers

If you're making or editing a page on the website, make sure that you use headers correctly. Bolding or underlining text, or just making it larger, does not count as a header and won't be read properly by screen readers. Use the header function in the text editor. There are 6 sizes of header, they are not interchangable or to be used based on cosmetics. The page, or element, if it uses a header, must start with a "Header 1" type header. Sub-headers can be used sequentially only. For example, a "header 3" cannot be under a "header 1", it can only be directly under a "header 2".

Image Standards

All Images must have alt text. Alt text is a description of an image which will both help visually impaired users, using screen readers, to understand this image and encourage search engine crawlers to index this image properly. This text must encapsulate the full meaning of the image in its entirety. Finalsite has articles detailing how to add alt text to images.

All images need to be handled in accordance to ADA laws going forward, and old images and pages will need to be checked for compliance.

Fliers & Alt Text Character Limit

Images with text must be transcribed in the alt text, this includes fliers. People need to be able to access this information with screen readers. However, alt text is limited to 500 characters. Any text past that limit will be cut off when read by screen readers.

Therefore, if you want to upload a flier that requires more than 500 characters of transcription & image description, you must have text accompanying the flier everywhere it appears on the site with all the information contained within the infographic.

Decorative Images

You will see a checkbox to mark an image as decorative text, which eliminates the warning to add alt text. You may not use this, as "decorative" is not defined the way you might think. An image of a watermelon on a page about a harvest festival may have been added for decorative purpose, but it is not classified as decorative. It must have alt text describing the image, which in that example could read "A group of watermelons on the vine." The only things classified as decorative would be, for example, a simple, custom frame around text or something which could otherwise not be described.

PDF Standards

Any PDFs on the website must meet modern ADA rules for PDFs. Old PDFs either need to be taken off the site and stored offline or updated to comply with modern guidelines. It's best to convert high-traffic PDFs like student handbooks into web pages (like this one). If something must remain as a pdf, like official signed forms, use Adobe Acrobat's Accessibility Wizard to ensure compliance, and read the ADA's PDF rules.