Booking Engine | ADA Compliance

What is ADA Compliance?

Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) regulates businesses to provide a website experience that works well for citizens with disabilities by meeting Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). An ADA compliant website provides an online experience accessible to everyone, including people with disabilities. This means having a site that accommodates visually impaired users by creating content suitable for screen-readers, using descriptive links, accessible forms, link titles, alt text on graphics and making website actions easily accessible via a keyboard, etc.

BookingCenter Booking Engines and ADA Compliance

All BookingCenter Booking Engine Templates are designed with the necessary elements to meet WCAG Guidelines and have been evaluated and tested for ADA Compliance. The necessary WCAG requirements have been implemented as part of the overall design of the Booking Engine Templates and can only be seen by screen reading software and in ADA evaluation tools.

One of the most important requirements is the "Alternative Text" function is also known as the "ALT Tag" for Images. "Alternative Text"  is the meta data attached to your image and describes the image for those with a visual impairment. Having accurate "Alt Tag" is important not only because it enables screen reading software, such as NVDA or JAWS, to describe images to visually impaired users, but also because it enables search engines to display images based on written descriptions and to display search results more accurately. 

We have provided an "ALT Tag "field for each Room Type Image in MyPMS, but the descriptive text must be entered by you  "ALT Tag" field for each Room Type Image. For  step-by-step instructions on how to enter the descriptive text in the "ALT Tag" field for each Room Type Image, go to Add/Edit Room Type Images

IMPORTANT: This means that every Room Type image on your Booking Engine should have descriptive "Alt Text" entered in MyPMS to ensure that your Booking Engine complies with ADA and WCAG standards.

How Can You Test Your Booking Engine for ADA and WCAG Compliance?

After you enter the "ALT Tag" for all images, you can test your Booking Engine to ensure that it complies with ADA and WCAG standards. There a a variety of free validation tools available. We have listed several of the most popular tools to get you started.

• https://wave.webaim.org/
• https://accessible.org/was/
• https://validator.w3.org/#validate_by_uri