WCAG Compliance

Meeting accessibility compliance guidelines isn’t a choice anymore.

Accessibility compliance has become an important part of our services to our website management clients. Recent legal action completed at the Supreme Court level moved accessible websites from ‘nice to have’ to ‘subject to government oversight under the Americans with Disabilities Act.’

Achieving and maintaining website accessibility serves everyone well.

For example, website visitors over the age of 40 have diminished ability to see low-contrast elements such as gray text on white background. Contrast standards require on-page text is clearly visible in contrast against background colors, photos or graphics. A medium gray font on cream colored background may look lovely and artful but may create frustration for these visitors.

Under our accessibility compliance services, we run regular scans of your website. These scans detail items requiring compliance remediation and we fix those items. We can also consult with brand identity and marketing design teams who want to create compliance-friendly interfaces – assuring contrast, navigation and functionality  strategies will meet spec.

Compliance, unfortunately, isn’t a one-and-done exercise. If the person updating the website is not trained in HTML or accidentally fails to add or complete a tag correctly, the site falls out of compliance. Regular scans spot these hiccups and fixes are generally quick and painless.

The key is to have a program in place showing regular effort is being made to remain in compliance with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). We maintain to v. 2.1 standards, the most recent adopted by the WCAG consortium.

If you engage us for WCAG Compliance Management, we will regularly scan and fix website errors as well as run a Quality Assurance scan that seeks out broken links, misspellings and other errors that can affect your website’s accessibility and search performance. We fix the errors and work with your update team member to train against future errors.

Compliance can be particularly hard to maintain when there are multiple people updating a website, especially if they are not familiar with HTML and WCAG standards. Our Compliance team is a great back-up to your team.

Three Quick Questions

What’s the first step?
We do an initial scan of your site to assess current status.
We provide a report with estimate to address any current issues and pricing for a maintenance program.

Will we do compliance work for sites we didn’t build?
If it’s WordPress, yes.

How often are scans and updates performed?
We’ll recommend either bi-weekly, monthly or quarterly depending on how frequently the website is being updated. The key is being able to show a program is in place and all good faith efforts are being made to stay in compliance.