Popchips

Popchips produces a delicious line of popped potato chips. A growing brand, Popchips’ legal team reached out to Resolve Digital to help make their website ADA compliant and ensure that their website is accessible to people with disabilities. 

The Challenge: An inaccessible website

The Americans with Disabilities Act, which became law in 1990, was aimed at ensuring that Americans with disabilities have the same opportunities and access to services as the rest of the country. The ADA was extended in 2008 by the ADA Amendments Act (ADAAA), which included a section on Public Accommodations and Commercial Facilities (Title III) which prohibits discrimination on the basis of disability in the activities of places of public accommodations.

In 2018 the DOJ clarified their position that although websites are not explicitly mentioned in ADA Title III, they are still considered to be public accommodations.

According to the CDC, 1 in 4 Americans has a disability. More than 3.4 million (3%) Americans aged 40 years and older are either legally blind or are visually impaired. 

Popchips needed to ensure that a large Americans with various disabilities could access and enjoy the Popchips site. The vendor that originally built the Popchips website had not considered the growing number of disabled users that would need to access the site and had not implemented best practices for web accessibility. Resolve Digital would need to correct this.

The Solution: Implementing the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. 

Resolve Digital decided to use the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), defined by the W3C, to ensure accessibility on the Popchips.com website and Americans with Disabilities Act compliance. The legal team at Popchips requested an initial list of changes and a budget for implementing them. 

Resolve Digital carefully audited the existing Popchips.com website and made an extensive list of changes that would need to be made to ensure the site was complying with WCAG 2.1 and defined changes required for level A, AA and AAA compliance.

Based on the estimates provided, and the ability to implement the changes without significantly reducing the site’s functionality, the legal team decided to implement Level AA compliance.

The team at Resolve Digital, over the course of 4 weeks, implemented and audited every change required to ensure WCAG 2.1 level AA compliance for the Popchips website and successfully deployed the updated site. 

Resolve Digital built a list of guidelines so that the marketing and admin users at Popchips who could edit the website using the CMS were able to safely edit the site and ensure ongoing ADA compliance. 

"Resolve Digital was extremely diligent and reliable during the process of making our business website ADA compliant. From understanding the features required to be compliant and setting best practices inorder to be compliant going forward, Resolve Digital completed the project within the expected timeline and within budget."

— Olga Lopez,  Digital Marketing Manager at Popchips

The Impact

The implementation of WCAG 2.1 to ensure ADA compliance and the access to millions of users with disabilities has allowed Popchips to remain ahead of the curve in terms of accessibility. Our efforts have given their legal team peace of mind and their marketing team the confidence to continue building out their website while ensuring ADA compliance and their users the ability to enjoy their site.