If you have a medical supplies website, you need to make sure it's accessible to everyone. This will ultimately improve the experience for all users, including those with visual and auditory impairments. Here are three helpful steps to take to ensure your medical supplies website is VPAT 508 compliant. 

1. Select a Representative Sample 

Companies that test for VPAT 508 compliance with websites don't have an unlimited amount of time. They only have so many resources to test your website's compliance. As such, you need to carefully select a representative sample of your website for them to test. It could be the landing page or the page that displays some of your medical inventory. Just choose a page that is visited by a lot of users, so you can effectively determine if it has the right level of accessibility or not. Then, these compliance tests will prove insightful.

2. Have the Sample Audited 

Once you've chosen an appropriate part of your medical supplies website to test, you need to have it audited. This will let you know what parts, if any, need improvements for users that may have some sort of disability.

These audits are pretty standard, but you need to make sure they're performed by a reputable company. Then, you can rest assured the audit results are accurate and truly indicate the status of your website's accessibility. After this audit, you'll know exactly what needs to be done going forward with your website. 

3. Conduct Quality Assurance Tests 

The last step in making sure your medical supplies website is VPAT 508 compliant is conducting quality assurance tests. These tests are designed to check to see if the changes you made are effective and improving the overall accessibility of your website. After performing several quality assurance tests, you may realize that more assistive technology is needed for your website. In this case, you can make the necessary adjustments before the final site verification process begins. Or, these tests may show that nothing needs to be changed with your website layout and practices. You can then continue as normal with your operations.

When you run a medical supplies site, it needs to be VPAT 508 compliant. Failing to meet this stipulation could result in lost sales and even hefty fines. So that these issues don't rear their ugly head, make sure you take the necessary precautions early on. With a concrete strategy in place, becoming VPAT 508 compliant will be much more manageable.