Prospective clients often tell us that they know a fully accessible website or a 100% ADA compliant website is impossible.
While perfection is possible, perfect accessibility can be extremely difficult – especially for websites with more pages, more unique content, and more dynamic elements.
With this difficulty comes expense, time, and energy.
Even if you hire a reputable digital accessibility company with in-house expertise, a website accessibility project can easily take 3+ months to complete. And the scope of these projects typically doesn’t encompass all of the pages of a website so there can still be a few issues that remain outstanding.
But many people are conflating what perfect accessibility, “100% ADA compliant”, and other terms means so let’s unravel the meanings and what’s necessary to prevent lawsuits.
Table of Contents
Legal Standard
First, when clients speak about ADA compliance, what they’re really referring to is not being sued over ADA compliance which is different. The current legal standard when it comes to ADA compliance for websites is meaningful access – is your website meaningfully accessible?
The standard for ADA compliance is not WCAG 2.1 AA or WCAG 2.2 AA conformance, which is what many people equate it to.
So when a Shopify store owner, for examples, asks us about a 100% ADA compliant website, they’re usually referring to full conformance with a version of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). And for Title III of the ADA, WCAG is still only a voluntary technical standard that is used as a reference for website accessibility.
The problem is plaintiffs’ lawyers are weaponizing these technical standards and construing instances of technical non-conformance against website owners. However, what many website owners don’t realize is the overwhelming majority of complaints filed concern a repeated group of issues, with several WCAG success criteria rarely making their way into a complaint.
This is why we created the ADA Compliance Course – so website owners know exactly what issues to focus on first to prevent website accessibility lawsuits.
However, best practice for ADA compliance is always full WCAG 2.1 AA conformance. And then WCAG 2.2 AA, once you reach WCAG 2.1 AA.
Difficulty
But as we mentioned at the start, making a website fully WCAG conformant is difficult. Plaintiffs’ lawyers write as if WCAG conformance is easy in their complaints, but it’s a lot of work and requires meticulous attention to detail over the course of months. Ironically, plaintiffs’ law firms themselves often have easy-to-catch accessibility issues on their own websites.
WCAG 2.1 AA contains 50 success criteria or requirements for conformance. Think of success criteria as things to do or account for when it comes to accessibility. These success criteria are highly technical and often layered with multiple conditions for conformance and/or exceptions.
While some success criteria are fairly easy to meet, others require extensive manual work and/or are technically complex and require web development expertise to put in place.
Perfection Process
To fully make a website WCAG conformant, here’s what you have to do:
- WCAG 2.1 AA audit
- Remediation
- Re-audit
- Secondary Remediation
- User Testing (optional but recommended)
And this is only for a given scope. You would still need to reconcile the rest of the website. In most cases, the audit and remediation process will take care of all of the structural accessibility issues sitewide because all of the unique page layouts and templates will be included in the scope. However, any unique content (e.g., images, texts, embeds, elements, etc.) across pages outside of the scope will still need to be accounted for.
This is quite the project, even for just your average Shopify owner.
Maintenance
And it’s not enough to reach the mountain top of accessibility, you have to stay there. And most organizations will not have the budget to continually source work to an accessibility company, so they’ll need to develop proficiency and expertise in-house.
This means training. And our lovely WCAG Course is the perfect course to learn the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. But still, to maintain perfection, the digital team cannot make a single mistake ever when editing code, uploading content, or redesigning the website.
That’s a herculean task.
Mistakes happen. Even with great processes in place.
Recap
While we always strive for perfection, accessibility should not be the pursuit of perfection, but rather access. And the legal system needs to understand this.
There are several dozens of potential accessibility considerations and it’s extremely difficult to not only find and fix them all, but then never re-introduce an accessibility issue.
Here are some key bullet points to remember:
- The standard for ADA Title III compliance isn’t WCAG, it’s meaningful access
- Best practice for ADA compliance is WCAG 2.1 AA conformance
- Plaintiffs’ lawyers do leverage WCAG to name technical issues
- Certain accessibility issues (approximately 15) are the focus of plaintiffs’ lawyers
