

Your company may be based in one country (in the USA or elsewhere), may operate business elsewhere around the globe providing services and products. The Standard of compliance and the requirements to meet accessibility is, of course, the same as the internet is open to the world. Some of the relevant standards are listed just above.
Standards-setting bodies are often independent, however could in some cases be government-run. They're composed of accessibility advocates who work and care enough concerning accessibility to involve themselves seriously. These people usually come back from a background of getting a disability themselves, having a loved one or dearest with a disability, working in disability spaces, feeling powerfully actuated to make a sensible amendment within the world or some combination of the above.
The bottom line is that these are individuals with good reason to think about accessibility, and a great deal of thought has been given to every compliance measure put into place. That’s before the discussions manifest themselves relating to what extremely fits best for the best variety of individuals, and what may be placed into place. In short, these are people worth listening to, and a good deal of work, thought, effort, and time has gone into the creation and maintenance of sets of standards both locally and internationally. These standards are never arbitrary. They deserve our respect and our compliance.
At first, the regulatory environment may seem like a tangled mess of overlapping and sometimes contradictory laws, but there is a great deal of agreement on what compliance means. It comes down to the basic principles of POUR.
POUR is a four-letter acronym you'll find a lot in the accessibility space. These high-level principles encompass functional accessibility: Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, and Robust.
We perceive things in the world via our senses. For users, the available senses in most spaces online or in tech are currently seeing and hearing, with touch at hand as well where haptics are included. New technologies may allow us to interface via touch, smell, or taste. Those would also be included in “perceivable”.
We operate controls, navigation, buttons, and other interactive elements in order to control an interface. When users can interact with an interface in this way, it is known as operability. Many users may identify elements visually and subsequently swipe or click. Other users will utilize voice commands or a keyboard.
What makes something understandable? Consistency of format and presentation, and predictability of design and use patterns, are part of what makes technology reliable and easy to navigate. Multimodal and concise content that is tone and voice appropriate is also more understandable. When content is comprehensible to users, they’ll find the interface more available to them. They’ll learn to use it, and remember it without a great deal of trouble.
Is your IT designed to function on all relevant technologies? Does it comply fully with all necessary standards? Can users choose how they interact with your material online, i.e., documents, websites, multimedia, etc? If the answer is yes to all of the above, that is robust.
Principles such as POUR can apply to many situations, online and off. Although they were originally intended to describe accessibility on the web, they are clearly pertinent in other areas of accessibility. Anyone working in technology should provide users with the ability to access their technology via perception, operation, and understanding. All tech should work robustly across multiple platforms, and assistive technologies must be included in that list.
Automated remediation based on a true and basic human desire to expand accessibility for all users is our starting point. The POLODA AI Accessibility Widget contains all the rules needed to adhere to global compliance standards and is able to scan and remediate websites to bring them up to those high levels of compliance.
And, as compliance standards change, the widget changes with them: we constantly update it and are continually researching new and expanded definitions of and standards for accessibility.
Without this tool, organizations are left using web developers to hand-code updates across all pages on their websites, which, as might be expected, is generally a time-consuming and expensive process. It also leaves a lot of room for errors and omissions.
POLODA AI has moved beyond basic automation to ensure strict compliance. Since almost every website contains some custom code, simple automation can’t interpret everything it scans. That’s why we developed an AI-powered accessibility widget that can decipher the structure of any site. It also writes grammatically-correct descriptions of the images it scans so screen readers can describe them to users who are visually impaired. No other website compliance solution is more efficient, or more cost-effective.
The speed at which a website can be made compliant is also critical with regard to litigation.
As compliance guidelines turn into compliance laws, businesses of all sizes with non-compliant websites are being targeted by lawsuits. This is clearly a financial liability, and, importantly, it also harms sales numbers and downgrades the digital reputation of a company when a large percentage of site visitors can’t gain full access. Demonstrating the ability to quickly remediate all the pages on a site while also being responsive to people with disabilities is the safest way to avoid financial losses and lengthy court cases.