When consulting with small businesses on making their website ADA compliant, our recommendation for preventing lawsuits usually comes down to one of two options: a full audit and remediation or a fast and furious – and strategic – fixing of as many of the most common claimed accessibility issues in lawsuits.
Let’s go over the best options to prevent being sued for small businesses.
Table of Contents
Deciding The Right Path
The right decision for your business depends on a few factors:
- risk tolerance
- sense of urgency
- budget
- access to a good developer
For a website owner with a smaller accessibility budget (less than $5,000), the fast and furious approach is the default choice because a full audit and remediation will usually cost $10,000 and up. You can review our pricing page to get a feel for how much an Accessible.org quote will be.
If your business has the budget necessary to complete a full project, the decision then centers around risk and your personal approach. If your mindset is more oriented around let’s just do whatever it takes to get as much as we can done right now, go the fast and furious route.
If your mindset is closer to you want to complete the project once and for all and check the box, then a full audit and remediation will be the right path for you.
ADA Compliance Course
For website owners that choose the immediate fix route, you’ll need the ADA Compliance Course to provide you with the strategy, issues, issue prioritization, and how to find and fix instructions.
The course includes everything your developer / digital team needs, laid out step-by-step.
Who Will Do The Work?
Once you’ve made your choice, the next step is to choose who will fulfill the work necessary.
For the immediate fix route, you’ll need to work with a skilled and competent developer. The ADA Compliance Course supplies the accessibility information, but you must have someone with a web development background to fix the advanced technical code issues.
If you choose to get a website accessibility audit, you’ll need a service provider who produces high quality audits. Then you’ll have to have a plan for how to execute on remediation.
Consultant Review and Remediation
Speaking of remediation, that’s the next phase of our project for website owners who choose the complete path. When working on remediation, make sure to start work immediately and not let up until you’ve addressed all of the issues in the audit.
One fail point for many website owners is they’ll trail off on remediation which practically decreases the value of the audit.
If you’ve taken the course and made all the fixes you can find, a rock solid next step is to hire a technical accessibility consultant to review the work. Obviously this isn’t an audit, but it is cost-effective way to ensure the issues have been properly addressed.
Important Points:
- Ensure complete remediation of issues found in the audit to prevent the audit from becoming outdated.
- Both approaches require ongoing attention to detail and competent developers to be effective.
Meeting Your Objective
If you worked using the ADA Compliance Course, once you’ve successfully implemented all of the lessons, you’ve met your original objective. Your website will be significantly more accessible and it will be extremely unlikely that you’re sued.
In the alternative, after you’ve completed remediation, your website will be fully WCAG 2.1 AA conformant which is quite a milestone. From here, you can even get certification documentation stating that you are in full conformance.
If you’d like to push forward, two additional options are WCAG training and user testing. And, of course, WCAG 2.1 AA conformance is always a best practice if you’ve taken the aggressive approach to your improving accessibility.
Resources and Services
Accessible.org provides everything you need for accessibility, from services to consultation to training, we are here to help you with your project.
Feel free to contact us for help with your project.
To learn more about what you can expect when working with us, visit our documents page. On this page, you can download our website accessibility audit template, sample services proposal, and certification documentation.
Also, you can start learning about accessibility and lawsuit strategy right now by signing up for our on-demand training at ADACompliance.net.
