ADA Accessibility for a Small Business Website
ADA Accessibility for a Small Business Website
Websites & ADA Accessibility
Accessibility is a hot topic in 2021. Of course we would all like our sites to be accessible by everyone. Everyone should be able to fully benefit from use of the internet, right? But with the range of disabilities, assistive devices and software currently in use, it becomes a challenge to make our websites work for everyone.
Equal Access
Most importantly, the internet should be accessible by everyone. Most of us enjoy the convenience of online shopping, e-banking, food delivery apps, and even online healthcare services. But people with disabilities don’t necessarily have that same access. Aside from the fact that making your website compliant is good business and the right thing to do, the disability community is a brand-loyal community with tremendous buying power.
The Challenge for Business Website Owners
Web accessibility standards are complex, none of the popular content management systems like WordPress are compliant with them out of the box, and manually coding a website to make it meet those standards — called manual “remediation” — is time-consuming and very expensive, into the tens of thousands for some sites and beyond the budget of most small business owners.
Making a website easily usable for anyone with any disability — visual impairments, hearing difficulties, deafness, cognitive and motor impairments, language and learning disabilities — means making it usable by any of the assistive devices or software the site visitor might be using. It has to check a lot of boxes.
Accessibility Laws Affecting California
Here’s a quick history of how the laws have evolved for us in California to now, beginning in 50s. But keep in mind that the cause of website accessibility is advancing internationally, and newer accessibility laws being enacted elsewhere don’t protect Californians from lawsuits originating out of state.
1959 – California’s Unruh Civil Rights Act
Protects people with disabilities from discrimination by most business establishments, including housing and public establishments. Originally intended for brick-and-mortar establishments but now includes virtual businesses as well.- 1973 – Rehabilitation Act
Prohibited the discrimination of people with disabilities to provide equal access to public transportation, telephones, bathrooms, and buildings. 
1990 – Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) Title III
Prohibits discrimination in the workplace. Title III requires places of public accommodations and commercial facilities, like restaurants, movie theaters, and doctors’ offices, to be accessible.- 1992 – Unruh Act Amendment
Any violation of the ADA is also a violation of the Unruh Act. Allows for plaintiffs to claim up to 3x in damages (including emotional distress) per incident, with a minimum of $4,000 in statutory damages. Protects all Californians no matter where the business is based. 
1994 – World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
founded at MIT’s Laboratory for Computer Science. Their members began developing best web accessibility practices.- 1998 – Section 508
Requires Federal agencies to make electronic and information technology equally accessible to people with disabilities - 1999 – Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 1.0
published by W3C - 2008 – WCAG 2.0
published by W3C - 2010 – Americans with Disabilities Act Standards for Accessible Design
Mandates that all electronic and information technology be accessible to those with disabilities. - 2017 – Section 508 Revision
Formally established the WCAG as the accessibility framework that federal agencies should use. - 2018 – WCAG 2.1 Guidelines, the current standard, released
- 2018 – Section 508 Revision
DOJ clarified that websites are considered places of public accommodation and should therefore comply with the ADA Title III. US courts refer to WCAG 2.1 Level AA as the international accessibility standard.
Risks For Small Businesses
Since WCAG compliance is a topic most small business owners have never heard of, they are vulnerable to threat letters and lawsuits initiated by disabled people who aren’t able to use their websites. Bewildered business owners still recovering from the effects of the pandemic are becoming aware of the risk, but even with the best intentions once they are aware of the problem, the fix isn’t easy and it can be so expensive that it can close a business down.
“Some critics called this wave of web accessibility lawsuits “legal extortion,” As plaintiff lawyers leverage the fact that often small businesses, like mom and pop stores, don’t realize they are doing anything wrong and are left to settle for between $20,000 and $50,000.
To begin with, the cost of defending such lawsuits can be crushing, even for a medium business that does have a sizable budget. At the end of the day, meeting a settlement agreement for an average of $35,000 and committing to fixing your site accessibility issues in order to become ADA compliant seems much more affordable than the risk of fighting in court and facing huge fines and attorneys’ fees.
Unfortunately, this trend also exposes business owners who are sued under the ADA complaint to pay the plaintiff huge compensations in the concept of damages, instead of giving them the opportunity to fix the site.
The implications of these findings are clear: lack of accessibility has become a major liability for any company operating on the web today.” — AccessiBe
Lawsuits in the News
Lawsuits Affecting Our Small Business Clients
A client of ours was recently threatened with a legal demand for $8500 for noncompliance with WCAG. We were able to work with our client’s attorney and get the threat withdrawn, but it required weeks of work, manual remediation (technical coding) on the site that we were able to do ourselves, and several rounds of communication with both attorneys.
Another client got notified that eight of her colleagues had been sued over noncompliance with WCAG.
How to Meet Accessibility Standards
Because of the variety of disabilities addressed in the standards, requirements for compliance are complex and stringent. We’re in the business of building websites that are marketing machines, that help our clients attract business. Meeting ADA standards while also meeting the current standard for an effective, competitive business marketing website can be challenging.
Of course, we would all like to make all websites ADA compliant. But we don’t have a magic wand to wave to make that happen, or even the means to implement the perfect solution for soloprenuers, small and medium businesses without multimillion dollar budgets. So we naturally start being motivated more by fear of lawsuits than altruism. Here are the options as we see them:
Take Your Website Down
As your marketing home base, your website is essential. No small business owner can do without a website, and that doesn’t serve the disabled community any better anyway, because then your services are invisible online.
Build Two Versions of Your Website
Create a standard marketing website that works for the majority of people who visit your site. Then create a second version that meets the WCAG 2.0 Level AA for disabled site visitors and keep it maintained at that level. Think $$$$$$.
Hire an ADA Compliance Company for Manual Remediation
Web accessibility “remediation” is the process of manually changing the code of websites to make them compatible with WCAG guidelines. This is an expense small businesses generally can’t absorb, because the process can take weeks of work by an accessibility expert and cost tens of thousands of dollars. Then there is ongoing expense to keep your site accessible. Every update to your website or to browsers can break that coding and create a need for more remediation work.
Install a Free Accessibility Plugin
The available free accessibility plugins for WordPress only meet about 20% of the WCAG requirements and aren’t even remotely close to what is required. So you’ll still be wide open to complaints.
Use an AI Machine Learning Overlay Widget
We are not attorneys. But fortunately, we have accessibility experience going back to the 90s, so we understand the technology challenges and we’ve studied the available options for small business owners.
The truth is that there is no perfect solution. Any solution short of manual remediation — constructing a custom coded website — is not 100% foolproof for disabled site visitors with a huge variety of needs for every possible element that can exist on a website.
But after reviewing the available solutions we now have a solution on our own site that we recommend for clients. We also include the software in our top tier website maintenance plan.
What to Do
Here are two ways to make your website accessible by a bigger audience:
- Sign up for accessibility coverage with our recommended solution here.
Get your own Accessibility account and build it into your website yourself.
OR - Get accessibility assistance with our Premium Maintenance Plan.
Along with other benefits of this plan, we cover the ongoing expense of installing and maintaining an accessibility overlay tool. You receive:
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- Overlay widget tool on your site for people with a variety of disabilities
- Monthly scans of your site
- Monthly WCAG compliance statement
- Our support to manage the subscription and software