Introducing accessiBe Integration

A new article has been posted to the TAM Blog by Jennifer Chan:

For the past several months, TAM Retail has thought long and hard over how to provide assistance to our partners over the issue of website accessibility.  After considerable research and study, TAM Retail is excited to announce its partnership with accessiBe.

But first… What does “website accessibility” mean?  It means accessible to persons with disabilities, which makes good sense.  As we’ve said in past blog posts, online shopping will continue to have substantial importance even after isolation restrictions are removed.  The people with disabilities community is a large percentage of the population, with spending power, that both needs and wants to be online.

The World Wide Web Consortium’s Web Accessibility Initiative developed guidelines and success criteria organized around four principles for web content:

• Perceivable – presentable to users in ways they can perceive;
• Operable – must be operable by the user;
• Understandable – understand the information as well as the operation of the interface; and
• Robust – content should remain accessible as technologies and user agents evolve

Their Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) include text and time-based media alternatives, keyboard functionality, and compatibility with assistive technologies.  WCAG is the go-to standard.  The problem is: How to tackle the herculean labor of compliance without undue burden or financial hardship?

Our recommended solution?  accessiBe! 

What AccessiBe does, and why we like it.  accessiBe utilizes two components that, together, achieve WCAG compliance.  The foreground application handles the UI (user interface) and design accessibility requirements, allowing persons with specific disabilities to adjust the website’s UI and design to their individual needs.  This includes font and color handling, animations, content highlighting, audio muting, and a search engine allowing people with cognitive disorders to decipher meanings of words and phrases.  The background application is AI, machine learning powered, which optimizes the accessibility level of your website every 24 hours.  This AI engine remediates the website’s HTML accessibility issues, as well as functionality and behavior, to the use of blind people using screen readers, and people with motor impairments using a keyboard to operate websites.  This makes it comprehensive and cost-efficient, two traits TAM Retail believes in.

accessiBe works with all browsers.  It is a session-based tool that adjusts the website on the fly after it’s been fully loaded and rendered.  There will be no difference in browsing experience for someone who has not activated any accessibility features.

With one line of JavaScript, your website will be fully accessible in less than 48 hours.  Upon completion, you will be given an Accessibility Statement for your website, the first sentence of which reads as follows:

We firmly believe that the internet should be available and accessible to anyone, and are committed to providing a website that is accessible to widest possible audience, regardless of circumstance and ability.

We’d be happy to tell you more, and probably will in the next few months.  In the meantime, we’re excited to start this journey with you.  Contact our sales department to get started at (888) 843-1476 or sales@tamretail.com.