Businesses of all sizes are getting sued by malicious attorneys and professional plaintiffs because their websites are not ADA compliant.
While risk management is an important part of any business, the most important thing for you to do is grow and manage your business.
We can help.
Our ADA Website Compliance Service has become an important part of our service offerings because we make it easy to have an ADA compliant website.
Why Make Your Website ADA Compliant
We developed our ADA Website Compliance Service for three reasons.
- To benefit those with disabilities by helping them get as much use and enjoyment as possible from the websites they want to visit or do business with.
- To benefit businesses by maximizing their revenue from their customers who might otherwise not be able to contact them or buy their services.
- To help protect businesses from frivolous nuisance lawsuits related to ADA compliance of their websites.
ADA compliance is a matter of degrees. There are hundreds of elements in the Website Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and it is very difficult to satisfy them all, regardless of who built the website, how they built it or when they built it.
So while there is never a guarantee that you won’t be sued by anyone at any time for any reason, your chances of being the victim of a website-related ADA lawsuit or threatened lawsuit go down substantially if you have your website built or adapted to be ADA compliant.
How Our ADA Website Compliance Service Works
Only a very small percentage of websites built over the last several years are fully (or near fully) ADA compliant. If we’re building a new website for you, then we’ll build your site to be ADA compliant.
But if your site was built by someone else or long ago, your site probably needs to be remediated — fixed — to make it ADA compliant.
- Step One is to perform a Preliminary Website Accessibility Assessment, where we determine how accessible your website is, and what needs to be done, and the costs of that work to make the site more fully compliant. We'll discuss the Assessment with you and talk about moving forward.
- Step Two is to remediate your site. For most sites, that means we will take care of everything. But if you have your own web developer, or some unique technology or other constraints, then we'll work with your team to provide them code and consulting services to make your site compliant.
- Step Three is that we continually monitor and update your site to ensure that it remains compliant.
Ordering Your Web Accessibility Assessment
We try to be efficient with all the work we do for you. So, while the requirements for Accessibility apply to all pages of your site, we don’t need to analyze every page to understand the accessibility level of your site.
Generally, there are many pages on your website that use the same software template. So it’s only those separate templates that need to be part of the Assessment
Our Preliminary Assessment is Free, and includes a brief Zoom consultation so that you can easily understand how accessible (or inaccessible) your site is.
For more information about our Website ADA Compliance Services, visit our Compliance website at WebCompliancePro.com.
Or, to get started, scroll down and fill out our Web Accessibility Preliminary Assessment Request form.
ADA Website Compliance FAQ
If you are like most people, you are not very familiar with ADA Compliance for websites. This FAQ is about answering your questions. If you don’t see your question here, then use our contact form to ask your question and we’ll reply with an answer, and post it here on our next update.
Just as the cost of the ADA Website Assessment varies, so does the cost of compliance itself. As you can imagine, a website with just a few templates and 10 pages will take less work to make compliant than a site that has 100’s of pages, video, music, a shopping cart, and other features. As a result, compliance costs for one website can be 10 or 100 times more than the costs for another website.
As with other types of compliance, including HIPAA compliance for Doctors, FINRA compliance for financial professionals, and PCI compliance for companies that accept and store credit cards, compliance costs are a large part of these companies’ operations budget. Along with GDPR and CCPA compliance, ADA Compliance is greatly increasing the costs of building and owning a website.
Unless we specifically described ADA Compliance when configuring and pricing your project, the answer is likely no. Adding ADA Compliance to a website adds substantial cost to a site, and up until now, there was nothing close to a definitive decision on whether it was necessary. With the recent (October 2019) Supreme Court decision, the need for website accessibility is more clear.
Almost all newer websites can be made to be ADA Compliant. Older websites built on older tools, or built from scratch with HTML, cannot be made ADA Compliant and will need to be rebuilt. Be sure to specify that you want your site to be ADA Compliant when discussing a new site with your web developer.
Before we take on your Accessibility Assessment, we will do a complimentary preliminary assessment to determine if we can help you. We won’t accept your request if we can’t help you.
WCAG stands for Website Content Accessibility Guidelines. It is a document and set of standards that describes how websites can be made Accessible to those with disabilities including visual, auditory, cognitive, mobility and others. The WCAG is drafted by the W3C, the organization that develops all website standards. You can see the latest WCAG 2.1 spec by clicking here. You can see the WCAG checklist by clicking here. And while the WCAG is a reference for website accessibility, the ADA does not cite or refer to the WCAG in any way. In other words, there are no “official” standards for website accessibility.
ADA Compliance is a matter of degrees, not a matter of Yes or No. It’s further complicated by the fact that the WCAG — the most comprehensive set of standards for website accessibility — is not even part of the ADA law. So the idea of your website being “compliant” is an imprecise term.
After you receive your assessment, you will have a choice as to how compliant you wish to make your site. If you have videos on your site, you’ll be given a choice to have us caption the video for you, which you may accept or decline. Some recommendations will require the colors or layout of your website to change, and you may not be willing to do that. Other compliance issues may be cost prohibitive. Even if you accept every recommendation we make, it is likely that your website will not be 100% ADA compliant given the comprehensiveness of the WCAG guidelines, that technology changes constantly and that WCAG Guidelines change from time to time.
Here in the United States, anyone can sue anyone for any reason. There is no way to protect yourself from being sued or from someone threatening to sue you.
As a result, while we can provide your Website Accessibility Certificate that shows to what degree your website is compliant, but WE CANNOT GUARANTEE 100% WCAG COMPLIANCE, OR THAT YOU WON’T BE THE TARGET OF A LAWSUIT, OR THAT YOU WON’T BE THE TARGET OF MALICIOUS THREATS, OR ANY OTHER POTENTIAL OR REAL DAMAGES OR CONSEQUENCES RESULTING FROM THE WORK WE DO OR DO NOT DO FOR YOU, YOUR COMPANY OR YOUR WEBSITE.
Web Accessibility Assessment Request
IMPORTANT: WE CANNOT GUARANTEE 100% WCAG COMPLIANCE, OR THAT YOU WON’T BE THE TARGET OF A LAWSUIT, OR THAT YOU WON’T BE THE TARGET OF MALICIOUS THREATS, OR ANY OTHER POTENTIAL OR REAL DAMAGES OR CONSEQUENCES RESULTING FROM THE WORK WE DO OR DO NOT DO FOR YOU, YOUR COMPANY OR YOUR WEBSITE.
NOTHING ON THIS PAGE SHOULD BE CONSTRUED AS LEGAL ADVICE. PLEASE CONSULT YOUR OWN ATTORNEY FOR LEGAL OPINIONS.
