ADA Website Compliance and Accessibility Monitoring Services

How Old-School, Manual ADA Website Compliance Usually Works

Most website accessibility remediation is done manually by developers based on the contents and layout of your website at the time. These project can be very expensive given the number of man hours they take to complete. To reach full compliance can cost thousands to hundreds of thousands and can take months to complete.

After you have gone to the time and expense of making your site compliant it requires constant updates to keep it that way. Once you update or edit your website, you often have to repeat the costly auditing process before the next round of remediation can begin.

After Your Site Is Accessible, Here’s What Happens Next…

After Now that your website is Accessible, any time your website is changed, our AI tool goes to work to automatically remediate the changes within 24 hours.

We conduct Quarterly Accessibility Assessments to look for any additional issues for your website. If we find any, we use the hour(s) already included in your plan to make the changes, usually at no additional cost to you.

With our ADA compliance monitoring system, when a visitor requiring accessibility modifications visits your site, they are immediately notified of the site’s accessible capabilities, and are given several options that he or she can customize via the keyboard in order to make the site work for them.

Meanwhile, your site retains its original design for all other users.

Our Ongoing ADA/WCAG Compliance Service Includes…

* Manual remediation hours may be included with your plan. Additional hours will be estimated ahead of time and billed at discounted rates.

What Does ADA Mean?

ADA stands for Americans with Disabilities Act.

The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 or ADA is a civil rights law that prohibits discrimination based on disability.

What Does Website ADA Compliance Mean?​

Defining “ADA Compliance for Websites” is still a gray area. Since the ADA has not been amended with specific accessibility standards, when most people talk about Website ADA Compliance, they are talking about a set of standards called the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).

The WCAG was developed by the World Wide Web Consortium, which is the same group that defines most web standards, including HTML. The WCAG is now at version 2.1, which contains over 90 individual guidelines. These requirements include things like…

…all of which have become as important as ramps on street corners, chirping “walk” signals at intersections, and close captioning on TV shows.

And while the WCAG is often used to evaluate a website’s accessibility, it is often open to interpretation. The real test of whether a site is accessible is a subjective evaluation when the site is used by someone with disabilities.

For all these reasons, there is no such thing as 100% ADA Compliance for Websites. But by making your website accessible, and posting an Accessibility Statement on your website, your chances of being the victim of a website-related ADA lawsuit or threatened lawsuit go down substantially.

The Alerting Story Behind Website ADA Compliance

The ADA became the law in 1990, before there ever was such a thing as a website. But the Department of Justice has not updated the ADA with specific standards for Website Accessibility.

In other words, whether or not the ADA applies to Websites had been a gray area of the law, even though the DOJ stated unequivocally that the ADA does apply to websites. Since then, thousands of Website ADA lawsuits have been filed all across the country, increasing recently by almost 40x. In 2015 there were just 56 website ADA lawsuits. In 2018 there were 2,258! (Source: American Bar Association Journal)

And these numbers do not include the tens of thousands of demand letters that were sent, or out of court settlements that were made.

In October 2019 the Supreme Court also made it clear (by refusing to hear a lower court ruling favoring a blind person who couldn’t use a website) that the Americans with Disabilities Act applies to websites as much as it does any physical place. This decision — or lack of one — is sure to cause the number of Website ADA lawsuits to rise dramatically in 2020.

The Website ADA Compliance Shakedown​

Business owners are on “Red Alert” because they know that attorneys are making a business out of suing honest business owners. They look for non-accessible websites (like yours?) and serve the website’s owners with Demand Letters for compliance, the threat of a lawsuit, and an offer of an out of court settlement. 

Costs for website owners vary, but can be in the tens of thousands of dollars. That’s because the demand letters often require:

• Remediation of the website
• Sensitivity training for your company staff
• Accessibility technical training for your developers
• Regular automated and live accessibility testing
• Keeping the settlement confidential
• Settlement Costs to the Plaintiffs
• Attorneys Fees to the Plaintiff’s Attorneys

And of course, you need to bear the costs of all of the above, plus your own attorneys fees. More often than not, the actual plaintiffs have never actually been harmed by using (or not using) the website in question. They are plaintiffs in name only.

If this sounds like a shakedown to you, you’re right. Stories about ADA shakedowns are in the news more all the time, and if your website is not WCAG accessible, it might just be a matter of time until this happens to you.

Of course, there is another reason to make your website accessible…a very legitimate reason.

The Most Important Reasons to Make Your Website ADA/WCAG Compliant

The number of people with disabilities increases every year, with estimates now about 20 million people in the United States. And these people want to enjoy their life just like everyone else. But most businesses don’t make their websites accessible, so people with disabilities cannot enjoy the web the same as people without disabilities can.

This is the problem that the ADA was designed to correct.

…And this is the best reason to make your website Accessible.