ADA Website Compliance Means Tax Benefits

There are myriad reasons to ensure your website is ADA compliant. It ensures that anyone, regardless of disabilities, can fully interact and engage with your pages. They will not be excluded from your site’s information and can enjoy the same benefits as the non-disabled. This also your business to reach as many individuals as possible, and you have the opportunity to provide your goods and services to a much wider segment of the country. Additionally, there are tax benefits as well — you might be able to deduct the cost of building your website as well as maintaining it. In today’s blog, The Youngblood Group, LLC discusses what makes a website ADA compliant in addition to the statute that enables the tax benefits.

Understanding ADA Compliance

This compliance is a set of standards that ensure accessibility for all. They are detailed in Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act, essentially modernizing requirements that were established before the advent of the internet. The gold standard of compliance is found in the WCAG 2.1 (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines), and it is advisable for all websites to adhere to it. Your website needs to be:

• Perceivable — Your content should be presented in an easily perceivable way. This means providing tools to supplement text, like audio alternatives or other assistive technologies to allow the sight-impaired to still access your content.
• Operable — Your website should be easy to navigate and operate. It needs to offer keyboard accessibility, so anyone can access your content through any tool they use to accommodate their disability.
• Understandable — Your content needs to be easy to understand. Make sure it is readable and predictable. Your website should offer input assistance to those who need it. This means utilizing tools that can accommodate and mitigate minor user errors
• Robust — Your website needs to be interpreted by various devices and platforms. It should be compatible with assistive technologies that those with different disabilities may need.

You can adhere to these criteria by having options for users like screen readers, smart contrast, and highlighted links. Adjustable line-heights, text alignment, text spacing, and more can also help you become ADA compliant.

Tax Benefits

In addition to ADA compliance being legally required for all businesses with 15 or more employees, it also has notable tax benefits. Section 44 of the IRS Code allows a tax credit for small businesses, and Section 190 provides a tax deduction for all businesses. The tax credit is for businesses that have a revenue of less than $1,000,000 in the previous years or few than 30 full-time employees. It is used to offset the costs of implementing tools to make ADA compliance possible and also maintain them. The tax deduction serves a similar goal and can be claimed to help make it easier to implement ADA compliance. Be sure to talk to your accountant to see how you can take advantage of these tax benefits.

Contact Us To Learn More About Tax Deductions

If you think you qualify for the tax credit, tax deduction, or both, we can help. If you have any questions about this section of the IRS Code or taxes in general, we are happy to work with you. You can schedule an appointment today to learn more and understand how ADA compliance can help you save money.