How Third-Party Services and Products Affect Your Site’s Accessibility
You’re a business owner committed to meeting or exceeding baseline web accessibility standards, but your site just failed a manual accessibility audit using blind and visually impaired consumers, and now you’ve got questions. One of the biggest issues tripping up online accessibility in a situation like yours is the use of third-party services that inadvertently act as roadblocks to what would otherwise be a well-designed and smooth navigation experience. Let’s explore.
What do we mean by third-party services?
Third-party services in this context refer to apps, add-ons, and plug-ins that are essentially targeted software overlays for your website meant to enhance the user experience or improve functionality. A basic example is adding a functional calendar to your website so clients can easily book appointments. But the spectrum of what these services offer is broad.
Examples range from relatively minor sounding things like adding calendars, privacy notices, and fillable forms, to more impactful things like live chat features, upgraded cart and checkout experiences, and video players.
The big advantage of using third-party services is that it allows you to continuously evolve your website into a better, faster, friendly version of itself without having to recode it at a foundational level. You can just agree to the terms of the third-party service, pay a fee if applicable, download, install, and go! (Or, for bigger services, you may work with an integration team.) This allows you to harness the development prowess of a third-party company with a seamless pre-packaged solution.
But is the result actually seamless? Or is it a matter of perspective?
Did the add-on just inadvertently subtract from your website’s accessibility? Unfortunately, accessibility disruption is a frequent problem resulting from the addition of third-party enhancements.
Even though lawsuits and regulatory fines are slowly bringing the web around to ADA compliance, third-party apps, add-ons, and plug-ins are just as far behind on ADA compliance as the rest of the web, and the most impacted consumers are those with vision impairments. So, what creates an increase in functionality and user experience for one consumer base, becomes an impediment to functionality and user experience for the 10% of the consumer population that is blind or visually impaired. .
How does this impact your website?
Third-party developers are held to the same Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and ADA standards as your website, but their failure to meet these compliance standards can end up being your problem. This is because legally, if it’s your website, your business is liable for any ADA-compliance failures. There are limits to your website’s liability to some degree, but not in any meaningful way. For instance, if your website incorporates a third-party service that ultimately navigates users to another domain, you are not liable by extension for any compliance failures hosted at the other domain. But you are liable for any compliance failures hosted on your own domain, even if those failures are due to accessibility roadblocks created by an app, add-on, or plug-in that you didn’t develop.
This means that every new third-party service you use exposes your business to an increased likelihood of failing to meet current regulatory standards, and to the lawsuits and fines that follow suit.
So, how do you stay current on compliance?
In a sea of non-compliant app, add-on, and plug-in developers, it isn’t necessarily easy to stay current on ADA website accessibility compliance, but there are two key things that you can do.
(1) Investigate accessibility upfront. As a first line of defense, be proactive. When your website is looking to enhance functionality or user experience in some way and you’re in the process of exploring third-party services, ask about ADA compliance initiatives built into the platform.
If accessibility is on their radar and they can explain the built-in design features that enhance, rather than inhibit, accessibility, you’re on the right track. Can they identify ADA, Section 508, or WCAG compliance integrations? Great! There may still be issues to work out on your particular website once the service is installed, but with like-minded developers keeping an eye on accessibility, you’re sure to make a smooth transition.
If accessibility is not on their radar, not accounted for in their design platform, or only discussed as something future-looking rather than current, you can almost be certain that this service is going to be an accessibility disrupter once it’s incorporated into your website. Does this mean that you shouldn’t use it? No, not necessarily. But, it does mean that you’ll have to incorporate step 2 (below) into your overall upgrade plan.
An added bonus of having this conversation with the third-party developer is that it puts the topic on their radar. By inviting a discussion of accessibility, regulatory compliance, and lawsuits, it sows the seeds of change. Chances are good that the developer will either add accessibility improvements in future versions or updates, or will develop additional software with regulatory compliance in mind. Which is a win for everyone.
(2) Work with an auditing service. After every website alteration or upgrade with a third-party service, you should have a manual ADA compliance audit performed. This will screen for unintended accessibility barriers that pop up in light of the new addition. You can opt for just an audit and compliance report to bring to your own developers, or an audit plus a remediation that brings your website back into compliance. Some auditing services, like AllyADA, offer subscription plans for this exact reason.
Remember that the types of third-party services that cause accessibility compliance problems are broad. So, again, it’s better to take a pro-active approach rather than assume that everything is fine. Being on the other end of an accessibility lawsuit or regulatory fine that you didn’t expect, or even actively tried to prevent, is an unfortunate way to be reminded of just how important ADA compliance is in the modern e-commerce industry.