We talk to website owner / operators who are afraid of getting sued over website accessibility every week. They read about WCAG, audits, plaintiffs’ lawyers, automated scans, ADA compliance lawsuits, but they still don’t know what exactly they need to do.
That’s why we created the ADA Compliance Course. But before we get to the course, let’s explain exactly how to reduce your risk of being sued in just 4 minutes.
Table of Contents
What’s Happening?
Plaintiffs’ lawyers are suing website owners over technical accessibility issues. They might send a demand letter first or they may go ahead and file a complaint in court.
Either way, website owners aren’t given notice or a grace period to fix the issue.
What’s the Best Way to Avoid a Lawsuit?
The best way to prevent being sued is to make your website WCAG 2.1 AA conformant.
WCAG stands for the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and these are technical standards for accessibility that tell you different things to do to make your website accessible. WCAG 2.1 AA is comprised of 50 success criteria or things to do.
How Do I Make My Website WCAG 2.1 AA Conformant?
You need an audit to find the accessibility issues and then you need to remediate or fix the issues.
Note that real audits are always manually conducted, real audits are never scans.
Why More Don’t Website Owners Do This?
Many do, actually. But making a website fully WCAG 2.1 AA conformant takes time and costs a fair amount of money.
An audit typically takes 2-5 weeks.
Remediation usually takes 1-3 or more months, depending on who is doing the remediating and the state of the website.
Audits can range from $2,500 to $7,500 and up.
Remediation can range from $3,500 to $12,000 and up.
What are Weaknesses of This Approach?
Although an audit and remediation to reach full conformance is the best, most air-tight way to not get sued, this path still has flaws.
Timeline
For one, the timeline. 4+ months is a long time to wait and in that time, a lawsuit is quite possible depending on the niches plaintiffs lawyers’ are focusing in on.
Prioritization
Another flaw is the lack of prioritization of fixes – if you want to prevent a lawsuit (or being sued again), there are certain issues that are much more likely to lead to a lawsuit. It’s highly recommended that you fix these first.
Reliance
One more problem is if you go with the wrong service providers, you can easily receive a bad quality audit or poor remediation.
Remember, the person fixing your website will typically only fix the issues found in the audit. If the audit misses many and/or significant issues, then that means issues will go unfixed. Similarly, if the remediation is done incorrectly, there will still be accessibility issues remaining.
This is more common than you might think and some of the biggest digital accessibility companies have audits with major oversights. Why? They’re not vetting who they source work too.
What About a Scan?
For many years, merely getting your WAVE scan errors down to 0 was a very effective way to lower your risk. WAVE is an automated scan that flags several accessibility issues.
And while getting your WAVE errors down to 0 is always recommended, it’s not nearly enough anymore. Plaintiffs’ lawyers have evolved and many law firms now contract with people with disabilities and accessibility professionals to find issues on websites.
They’ve even asked us for help. We didn’t respond.
What is an Alternative Approach?
A very nice alternative is to focus on the accessibility issues that are most likely to lead to a lawsuit.
What most people don’t know is there are 15 issues that are repeated over and over again in ADA website lawsuits. We know this because we’ve looked through literally hundreds of actual complaints filed in court by the most active plaintiffs’ law firms and almost all of the claims come back to the same 15 issues. The top 3 issues are:
- missing alt text
- missing form field labels
- lack of keyboard navigability
We recommend aggressively diving right in and fixing these top 15 issues first as fast as possible.
This is where the ADA Compliance Course comes into play.
ADA Compliance Course
The ADA Compliance Course was designed specifically to prevent ADA website lawsuits. The course, created by Accessible.org founder Kris Rivenburgh, lays out all of the 15 issues and the exact order to fix them in. The course also provides step-by-step instructions on how to find and fix each issue.
The course is extremely thorough and even includes code examples of how to fix the issues. This level is detail is necessary because plaintiffs’ lawyers are paying very close attention to the details and applying WCAG standards strictly against website owners.
Once you have implemented all of the lessons in the course, you will have mitigated most of the risk of being sued because you will have fixed the issues that plaintiffs’ lawyers look for.
WCAG Conformance
While the ADA Compliance Course is the exact right path to start improving your website’s accessibility (you improve accessibility while lowering your risk), completing the course won’t make your website fully WCAG 2.1 AA conformant.
And, remember, WCAG 2.1 AA is best practice.
So after you finish the course, we recommend continuing on with the rest of the WCAG success criteria. The good news is by starting with the ADA Compliance Course, you’ll already have a major head start on conformance and most of the remaining WCAG issues are less complex fixes.
We also have a WCAG Course that explains all of the WCAG requirements in plain English.
Conclusion
No matter what path you take, we urge you to be proactive and start on accessibility ASAP. The more issues you fix, the less likely you are to be sued.
And if you take a strategic approach, you will reverse engineer lawsuits that have already been filed and start fixing those issues first. The less you give plaintiffs’ lawyers to work with, the more likely they are to move on to the next website.
We’ve combed through hundreds of lawsuits and written out the answers to the test in the ADA Compliance Course.
