Website Compliance Guide

The Ultimate Guide to Website Compliance: Understanding Legal and Regulatory Requirements

A website compliance program is so necessary today to ensure you reach users with disabilities and to avoid unnecessary lawsuits and penalties. In addition to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), the myriad overlapping website legislations in different countries make it even more complicated. So to make things easier, this guide gives you an overview of the general information you need to stay compliant. And if you still need help understanding legal and regulatory requirements for website compliance, we at ADA Site Compliance can help. We are the #1 source for all ADA website compliance tips and work. We have a team of accessibility experts to clear any doubts and help you create the ADA-compliant site-accessible website you are looking for.

How to Check if My Website Is ADA Compliant and Reduce Web Accessibility Claims?

The best way to reduce possible ADA web accessibility claims is to make ADA legal compliance part of your business. This means including these best practices in your everyday regime helps minimize your risks of exposure. There are two ways to check for website compliance. The first is to do it using one of the many online tools. These tools will scan your website and let you know if you have some accessibility issues.

However, it is not enough to depend on the tools to ensure website compliance. The human touch is always better, so get a second opinion by hiring paid services. The added advantage of a paid service is that they usually have people with disabilities on their team to conduct accessibility checks. They will provide the best website compliance rating based on user disability issues. As it’s expensive to have an in-house accessibility expert, it’s worth hiring accessibility providers to conduct a human website assessment for compliance.

Some Operable Web Accessibility Guidelines to Consider

If you realize that your website or online document is non-compliant, there is no need to do a complete revamping immediately. There are a few things you can first try for ADA compliance.

1. Ensuring complete functionality using a keyboard

2. Provide visitors with sufficient time on the website

3. Avoid using any form of blinking or flashing content

4. Website navigation to let users know where they are and can go

5. Color contrast

6. Use more buttons with different and more appropriate text

7. Video content with closed captions

8. Images should have helpful alt text

General Data Protection Regulation for Industry-Specific Websites

1. Website legal HIPAA requirements for healthcare websites

2. Contractor website requirements

3. Financial advisor website requirements

Regulatory Workplace Compliance

Numerous regulations related to employment and health insurance coverage in the workplace relate to health administration in any business. They include:

• Hiring practices

• Wages and hours

• Employee discipline and termination

• Workplace Safety and Environment

• Sexual harassment, intimidation, and other offensive acts

• Unfair hiring and employment systems and recruitment and retention of employees

Besides, all organizations should make it mandatory that their employees understand compliance issues. This is important because it helps the organization to meet its goals. In addition, high-performance employees need to adhere to and abide by ADA-compliance regulations. All regulations should be regulated, and industries should follow all rules. For example, HR practices should prevent the implementation of any potentially discriminatory practices while recruiting resources. And most importantly, employees should perform hiring procedures as prescribed to avoid facing EEOC sanctions.

Rules and regulatory compliance companies regulations in countries outside the US

All countries outside the US have various regulations to follow. Here is an overview of regulations in four countries having multiple regulators:

1. Australia

2. Canada

3. India

4. United Kingdom

Specific Industry and Public Interest Laws and Regulations

There are tens of thousands of laws and regulations applicable to organizations across the US and federal law. And most of them are within specific industries and subject areas. Examples of a few of these sectors include financial, healthcare, employment/workplace, environmental, and immigration. Regarding technology and data breach security, multiple regulators and regulations like the Finnish Personal Data Act and the Austrian Federal Act Concerning the Protection of Personal Data help protect data retention and prevent data breaches.

The California Senate Bill 1386 needs a special mention; as per the bill, any company experiencing data breaches must notify California citizens whose personally identifiable information the cardholder data breach may expose. And about civil rights, the US Civil Rights Act of 1964 bans any form of discrimination based on sex, national origin, race, or religion. Similarly, the Americans with Disabilities Act bans any form of discrimination based on disabilities, offline and online. The idea is that everyone has the right to public places like hotels, schools, and tourist attractions. With the online space, the ADA defines that everyone should have access to websites to do everything. This includes shopping, booking tickets, looking for jobs, and conducting business.

Define Regulatory Compliance Cost

Regulatory Compliance Cost is the total amount of other resources an organization will have to spend to ensure compliance with all applicable regulations. For example, some regulations require the maintenance of detailed records about employee time and other related company resources. Calculating the total economic costs for organizations in the US complying with all regulations is not easy. For example, a 2017 American Hospital Association report estimates that the US healthcare industry regulations cost hospitals $38.6 billion annually.

Costs of Non-Compliance with Regulations

It is not only the cost of complying with regulations that is steep. The costs of non-compliance to WCAG guidelines are very steep too. In fact, according to experts, the costs of non-compliance are much steeper. The government imposes penalties on web developers and website owners for non-compliance. The fine to pay for minor violations like missing deadlines for filing annual reports is not very expensive, amounting to a few hundred dollars.

However, SEC and other financial violations can lead to penalties of millions of dollars in fines. Hospitals violating HIPAA patient privacy provisions risk facing several millions of dollars in fines for all massive data breaches or repeat incidents incurred. In Europe, the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation applies to all organizations obtaining or storing the personal data of EU citizens. In short, it also means the regulation applies to many businesses in the US. And these penalties are not small amounts. The maximum for violating some GDPR provisions is 20 million Euros or four percent of the organization’s gross global revenue.

Agencies Overseeing Regulatory Compliance

There are hundreds of local, state, and federal government agencies administering laws and regulations applicable to organizations. These agencies and some groups also guide companies into compliance programs understanding and following all applicable laws and regulations. Some federal agencies and groups include the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control, the Small Business Administration, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

Non-Governmental Entities Overseeing Industry Standards and Regulations

There are some industry-related organizations with established standards serving quasi-regulations in specific industries. Some nonprofits like Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) and the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) also oversee certain industries and regulations.

Standards Guiding Regulatory Compliance

Some standards, for example, NIST Standards and ISO/IEC 27002, were set up to guide compliance with some regulations.

Organizational Strategic Issues Related to Regulatory Compliance

Organizations that face significant regulations must start considering how they should structure their companies and processes. This is to ensure they can operate well while complying with regulations. This means the company leaders have to take into consideration multiple factors:

• Strategies to use to balance compliance between legal, auditing, and all other business functions

• Creating internal systems to use for monitoring and reporting compliance

• Encouraging and developing common compliance strategies across various teams and company locations

• Predicting the potential impact regulations will have on a company’s strategic direction, business goals, and regulatory compliance systems

• Strategies to use to measure compliance value, like employee performance evaluations

How Organizations Can Handle Regulatory Compliance Processes

There are various steps organizations need to start adopting and implementing to ensure and handle regulatory compliance. These strategies include:

• Larger companies and all companies that are within highly regulated industries have to start hiring employees. They may have to hire dozens or hundreds of employees whose primary duty and focus would be the company’s regulatory compliance.

• In the case of companies with publicly traded stock, the Securities and Exchange Commission requires that these companies have a compliance officer. While most such companies have regulatory compliance departments, other banks and large companies have hundreds of compliance staff.

• On the contrary, smaller private companies may not have even one employee handling compliance issues. They usually have a company lawyer, an external lawyer, or a top company executive to deal with compliance issues. Whoever is chosen is generally advised that smaller companies ensure they have a point person in charge of all regulatory compliance issues.

It is not only hiring appropriate staff that will help companies regulate complaints. Various software or internal assessments help with regulatory compliance. These software and internal assessments include:

• Acquiring Compliance Management Software

• Assessing Auditing Systems

• Developing Business Continuity Plans

• Assessing and Improving the Security and Privacy of Information Technology Systems

Internal Regulation Requirements for Businesses

It is required by most states that companies maintain a habit of supplying information on their business operations. There is always the probability of some legal requirements affecting some business aspects.

Conclusion

While designing your website, you must remember that millions of people worldwide have disabilities. Though they have disabilities, they are on the lookout for and need the same services and products as any other users. So they will be conducting searches online and visiting websites. So remember them while designing your website to ensure you do not miss out on this massive market. Or risk ending up having to pay huge penalties.

You need not worry much if you do not have the time or people to work toward ADA compliance. There are many services online you can turn to for help and hire to create an ADA-compliant website. We at ADA Site Compliance, for example, are one of them. We are the #1 source for all ADA website compliance tips and work. We have a team of accessibility experts to clear doubts and help you create the ADA-compliant website you seek!