So sharing the screen with me is a document, the heading is Common ADA Compliance Money Wasters. And one of the ways people waste money is by buying overlay widgets. And it doesn’t matter how cheap they are, even if it’s $50 a month or whatever it is a year, it’s still an ongoing subscription where you are paying and getting back nothing in return.

The only thing you’re getting back in return is something where you have decided in your head that you are getting back something in return. Because accessibility, overlay widgets, they don’t make your website accessible, they don’t make your website conformant with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, and they don’t prevent lawsuits.

So plaintiffs law firms disregard them and will send a demand letter or file a complaint in court regardless of whether an overlay widget is installed. And we can prove this from the data. So if you go to overlayfalseclaims.com, we can see there’s a PDF report where I think they have 200 different instances where someone had an overlay widget installed and they nevertheless got sued.

So overlay widgets do nothing. They don’t prevent lawsuits, they don’t make your website accessible, and so you’re really paying for nothing. And a lot of people just feel better about having purchased something. They want to believe in the hype that the overlay widget vendors are selling.

And so they end up wasting their money that way, but they get nothing in return. Monitoring is another money waster. So monitoring, it can involve having an automated scan run, let’s say daily or weekly, whatever it is, and then a report is sent on the pages that are scanned, and then that report identifies different accessibility issues.

Monitoring, and we’ll get to this in the next bullet point. With premium scans, monitoring does really nothing for you because for you to actually get value out of monitoring your website for accessibility issues, you have to fix those issues as they are being identified.

And so your resources are limited, right? Like if you could fix them instantly, that would be perfect, but you can’t. And moreover, the monitoring is going to return results from any number of pages, so it really can get to something that’s overwhelming.

So with monitoring, you have to ask yourself, how can I leverage this to actually get an ROI out of it? And you really can’t, because if you could, you would really just go and use a free scan and scan the different pages and then take action based on those free scans because you can only do so much.

So why are you attempting to monitor, let’s say, a 25 page website, and have those issues sent to you. Further, if we go down that path, if someone is uploading content or editing a website so that the code is inaccessible and results in an accessibility issue that’s detected by a scan, then you need to train that person so that they are not introducing the error.

So you don’t really want to invest in monitoring because it’s headed in the wrong direction. Rather, you should invest in accessibility so that you have trained your staff, your contractors, so that they are not introducing accessibility issues.

And also, we all know that automated scans are limited in the number of issues that they can detect. So monitoring, even of itself, even as it is, would be incomplete. So you’re not getting all of the issues that you would be if automated scans could flag everything.

So there’s really like, you just have to ask yourself, okay, if I get monitoring, what am I actually doing? How am I advancing accessibility, or how am I lowering my risk of litigation? And if you can’t identify that, then there’s really no use for monitoring.

So it’s great to know if an accessibility issue comes up, but we really shouldn’t be at that point, we should really be making sure that no accessibility issues are introduced altogether. There really shouldn’t be accessibility issues that are being introduced.

On the third bullet point, premium scans, this is going to be similar to monitoring. So you’re going to get reports, they’re going to look nice, you’re going to have any number of customizable columns and figures and possible, like the number of accessibility issues, the number of conformance level A issues, conformance level, AA issues, and so on.

But there’s no real value because, again, you cannot take action on all of these reports, right? Like, if you could, then you would just run a scan at whatever interval you wanted to and decide what pages you’re going to run on and then resolve those issues.

But as it is, there’s nothing you can do with these premium scans that are returning all of these accessibility issues. You can only remediate one page at a time, maybe two pages at a time, and that’s going to be the extent of it.

So with premium scans, the one exception is authentication for non public pages. So in that case, I can see some value because you can log in to different pages and see those pages even though they’re not publicly available.

So with a free scan, you will need pages that are publicly available, and in this case, you could authenticate using a premium scan. So there is some value there, but it’s important not to place too much emphasis on scans because they are limited.

And you don’t need to pay for this large number of pages because you can’t take action on it. If you have this, let’s say, 50 page website, and you want to find all the accessibility issues, that’s fine, but you’re not going to be able to take action on page 49.

You can only take action one page at a time. And that’s why I recommend free scans, because you can only work through so many URLs. There’s no need to have results from all of these different pages.

And further, if you take action on these initial pages, you can likely resolve the issues on the later pages. So it’s overwhelming for a lot of teams and it’s unnecessary. So a lot of people waste money on premium scans.

They get sold on the premium scan. They usually get sold under the pretense that it will prevent litigation. But the only way to prevent litigation is to actually take action. And to take action, you’re going to need to focus in on one page at a time.

And if that is the case, then why do you need results for 100 pages? And then last, people waste money with audits. And so audits are a good thing. Audits are very helpful. They identify all of the accessibility issues.

In theory, if the auditor is good, it will identify all or almost all of the accessibility issues located within the given scope for the audit. And the problem is, when you don’t act upon those, eventually the audit loses its freshness and you would really need to audit the entire website all over again from the start.

And so the audit at that point will have served no purpose. So you must take action upon the audit for the audit to return value. If you don’t do anything with the audit, it’s a complete waste of money.

And I’ve seen audits many times be wasted. There might be some work that’s done and then things get put to the side, another project gets started, the website has changed. And if that’s the case, then you are wasting the money that you have paid for an audit.

And all of the time and energy and expertise that has gone in, gone into performing the audit and creating the audit report, that’s all been wasted. So while audits are a positive, a plus, I recommend them, I think they are great to have.

If you don’t take action upon them, they’re a complete waste of money because they will become stale. So I think those are four common ways that I think of that people waste money when trying to make their website Ada compliant.

Of course, there can be more ways, but these are the primary ways where I see a tremendous amount of money being wasted, and each of these comes at a significant cost. With monitoring and premium scans, you’re getting into the thousands of dollars, potentially audits, again, thousands of dollars.

And just understand with scans that you can only take action upon so many things at once. And there are really good free scans available. So WAVE is a good, simple and basic scan that you can take action on it is free for single pages.

The AXE scan is another really good scan. It’s more advanced, it’s more technically advanced, and it will flag more issues. But both scans are really strong, very helpful, and they’re completely free for single pages.

Remember, you, like, can only work on one page at a time.

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There are many big organizations that struggle with accessibility and it’s not for a lack of resources. Actually, too many resources can get in the way. And so on the screen with me, I have a document where I have bullet points on the struggles that many big companies have with website accessibility. Or it could be digital accessibility more broadly. But I’m going to go over these struggles and then I’m going to have some recommendations to help combat these struggles.

So first, one problem is there are too many approvals needed or too much collaborations needed. So you might have all of these different departments and you have approvals needed and approvals might be needed at different levels. That is going to create a problem with accessibility and you’re going to slow down the progress. So I’ll address that in the recommendation section below.

Another struggle is there are too many projects going on at once. You might have an accessibility project, you might have a project where you’re working on something else on the digital asset, or just something else entirely, and there are too many things that are going on simultaneously. So with accessibility, you are going to need to focus in on accessibility, and I’ll have more on that in a second.

You might be working on too many digital assets at once, so you might be working on a mobile app, one website, another website, and that’s already too many digital assets to be working on at once, so you want to focus in on one digital asset at a time. That’s not because we don’t want to make all of the digital assets accessible, it’s because we can only do so much. Even with a tremendous amount of resources, it usually becomes too much to work on the accessibility of multiple digital assets.

You also may have too many people working at once. This can become problematic because as much as we want to make this happen as soon as possible, if we have, let’s say, ten people working on accessibility, it can create confusion and it can create problems on who’s working on what and what is the proper approach and tracking the completion of the projects. So too many people can actually work to your detriment.

And similarly remediation on too many issues is attempted. So if you’re trying to remediate, let’s say, the content, let’s say your images and your videos, and you’re also trying to remediate all of the interactive elements on your website, you’re doing too many things at once. You want to finish something and then move on to the next issue.

Another struggle is there’s no clear delegation or responsibilities. This may be something where a department takes it on and the department generally works on it, but nobody’s exactly sure who is working on what and who is responsible for its completion. That can create problems.

Also no prioritization, so there should be a prioritization in which accessibility issues you take care of first and this is big because I have seen even the largest of companies, they’ve been sued multiple times and it really starts to frustrate them because they’re working on accessibility and yet they’re getting sued once and then again. So it’s usually because they start with accessibility because they’ve been sued and then they get sued again while they’re working on accessibility. And then they find out that this may continue on and on until they finish. And it’s in part because there is no prioritization. So prioritizing accessibility issues is extremely important in reducing risk of litigation.

And my ADA compliance course has the accessibility issues already prioritized. It also provides strategy on how to prioritize custom specific to your website and your situation. So continuing on with the struggles, there are no clear timelines, so this has to get done. We can’t just let this be an ongoing project. Because accessibility, if you let it, it can last for years, for literally years. And that is because of course, there are always updates or new content that we could potentially have, but we need to have a clear timeline. And I said accessibility, it’s not because of accessibility. Accessibility, yes, we need to constantly work on accessibility, but if there are no clear timelines, a project can just have a way of meandering and stalling out and not completing. So we need to have a firm deadline that we need to get this done. It needs to have a sense of urgency to it.

There are many big organizations that struggle with accessibility and it’s not for a lack of resources. Actually, too many resources can get in the way. And so on the screen with me, I have a document where I have bullet points on the struggles that many big companies have with website accessibility. Or it could be digital accessibility more broadly. But I’m going to go over these struggles and then I’m going to have some recommendations to help combat these struggles.

So first, one problem is there are too many approvals needed or too much collaborations needed. So you might have all of these different departments and you have approvals needed and approvals might be needed at different levels. That is going to create a problem with accessibility and you’re going to slow down the progress. So I’ll address that in the recommendation section below.

Another struggle is there are too many projects going on at once. You might have an accessibility project, you might have a project where you’re working on something else on the digital asset, or just something else entirely, and there are too many things that are going on simultaneously. So with accessibility, you are going to need to focus in on accessibility, and I’ll have more on that in a second.

You might be working on too many digital assets at once, so you might be working on a mobile app, one website, another website, and that’s already too many digital assets to be working on at once, so you want to focus in on one digital asset at a time. That’s not because we don’t want to make all of the digital assets accessible, it’s because we can only do so much. Even with a tremendous amount of resources, it usually becomes too much to work on the accessibility of multiple digital assets.

You also may have too many people working at once. This can become problematic because as much as we want to make this happen as soon as possible, if we have, let’s say, ten people working on accessibility, it can create confusion and it can create problems on who’s working on what and what is the proper approach and tracking the completion of the projects. So too many people can actually work to your detriment.

And similarly remediation on too many issues is attempted. So if you’re trying to remediate, let’s say, the content, let’s say your images and your videos, and you’re also trying to remediate all of the interactive elements on your website, you’re doing too many things at once. You want to finish something and then move on to the next issue.

Another struggle is there’s no clear delegation or responsibilities. This may be something where a department takes it on and the department generally works on it, but nobody’s exactly sure who is working on what and who is responsible for its completion. That can create problems.

Also no prioritization, so there should be a prioritization in which accessibility issues you take care of first and this is big because I have seen even the largest of companies, they’ve been sued multiple times and it really starts to frustrate them because they’re working on accessibility and yet they’re getting sued once and then again. So it’s usually because they start with accessibility because they’ve been sued and then they get sued again while they’re working on accessibility. And then they find out that this may continue on and on until they finish. And it’s in part because there is no prioritization. So prioritizing accessibility issues is extremely important in reducing risk of litigation.

And my ADA compliance course has the accessibility issues already prioritized. It also provides strategy on how to prioritize custom specific to your website and your situation. So continuing on with the struggles, there are no clear timelines, so this has to get done. We can’t just let this be an ongoing project. Because accessibility, if you let it, it can last for years, for literally years. And that is because of course, there are always updates or new content that we could potentially have, but we need to have a clear timeline. And I said accessibility, it’s not because of accessibility. Accessibility, yes, we need to constantly work on accessibility, but if there are no clear timelines, a project can just have a way of meandering and stalling out and not completing. So we need to have a firm deadline that we need to get this done. It needs to have a sense of urgency to it.

We cannot get caught in this area where it’s just unsure what everyone is doing, where they’re going, why they’re halted while they’re paused on something. We don’t want to have any of those situations where work has stopped because for another reason and nothing is continuing on.

We need to take a regimented approach to this and move forward day by day. There should be significant progress day by day, because if you do that, if you have the resources to have three to four people working on accessibility, then for a single website, this can be a week long project. It just depends on how much content you have, right? Content will slow you down because accessibility for content can involve a lot of manual work.

But that’s something where if someone is working on, let’s say, alternative text, they can recruit a subset of people to help them with alternative text. But this should not take months. This at most should take three weeks if you’re on a single website. So keep that in mind and make sure that there is significant progress each and every day.

And then also for the duration of the Accessibility project, you want to freeze updates to website or content for one to three weeks, as long as you can freeze it for so that progress can be made and that the foundation of accessibility can be implemented before we start to change different elements, to change different content, to add content to that. And then what we also want to do, what is not on this document is you want to invest in accessibility so that your team is more familiar.

So anybody that is changing code, anybody that is editing code, anybody that is changing content, updating content, adding content, et cetera. Any of the personnel, the digital personnel that are responsible for making updates or adding content you want to make sure that they are familiar with accessibility and that they start to learn accessibility and eventually that they become their own mini accessibility expert, at the very least for what they are responsible for.

And if you do that, then we won’t have to have this larger endeavor. Each time for accessibility, it will become easier and smaller and the cost will decrease because we will not be going back and changing what we’ve already done. Rather, we will only be making small changes and each time they will be reduced until we get to a point where accessibility is just a seamless part of our process and it comes through finalized with a perfectly accessible experience, digital experience, no matter what digital asset you’re on.

So those are many of the struggles, and those are my recommendations for those struggles. My ADA Compliance Course can help an organization of any size. If you are a larger enterprise, it will help your accessibility Coordinator understand the accessibility issues that are most commonly litigated by the most active plaintiffs law firms, and then your coordinator can prioritize based on those accessibility issues.

I also have a WCAD Course where your team can understand the different accessibility principles, but also all of the success criteria in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. And these technical standards are the source for Web and digital accessibility. So if you invest in training and your team understands the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and the success criteria that comprise the guidelines, you are going to be much, much better off and save significant time and energy down the line versus needing to outsource accessibility every time the need arises, right?

So this way, if there are accessibility issues, your team can resolve those in house because they are familiar with them and they can understand them. But I highly recommend the ADA compliance course and the WCAG course, and I will link to them below. Any enterprises will be much better off for having gone through that training.

The post Why Big Companies Struggle with Digital Accessibility Despite Significant Resources appeared first on The ADA Book.

When buyers are evaluating accessibility services, they have an important decision to make. But it’s a really hard decision on who to choose. And many people let price play too much of a factor in who they choose. And that’s not to say that the highest price is the best or the lowest price is the worst. That’s not what I’m saying at all. What I am saying is that you have to pay attention because these services are not the same. You are not picking out of the same quality of services. There are various qualities of services throughout the marketplace. So you have to be aware that whoever you select, they may be a bad service, they may be an incomplete service, even the higher priced ones, they may be just overcharging, or they could be overcharging and then offering a bad service on top of that. So that does happen.

So it’s important to keep in mind that when you talk to different accessibility providers that you get a feel for them and their quality of work and use that to make the best decision possible. But it is not easy. So on the screen with me is a document and in the first section I have PDF remediation as the heading and I have service A at $300, service B at $1,000, and service C at one $200. And so if you see service A being priced at $300, you have to wonder why is that so much lower than the other prices? And the more prices you are able to get, the more quotes you are able to get, the better off you will be. Because if there is something where it’s much, much higher or much, much lower, you can try to find out why. But generally the cost of services should be about in the same ballpark. If you have quotes for five services and three are in the middle and the other two are outliers, you have to wonder why those other two are in the outliers.

And so this is in part guesswork, but it is something where you’re going to have to use your intuition and your common sense to determine who to choose. And knowing that price is only one part of this really, you don’t want to choose based on price. What you want to do is choose based on your intuition, who you think will do the best job, who specifies the most detail, who seems the most genuine about the service they provide and their reputation. Because there aren’t a lot of reviews on accessibility services, there just aren’t. You might find a website that offers, that has reviews, but there aren’t a lot of real reviews on these websites. So you just have to do your best evaluation and determine who you feel most comfortable with, who you think not did the best job with presentation, but will do the best job with your website.

And so the next heading we have a website accessibility audit. So same scenario where we’re evaluating different services. This time it’s for an audit. We have service A at $1,500, service B at $4,500, and service C at $11,000. Service A is very likely under pricing. And so you have to wonder why that price is so low when the others are much, much higher. And service C conversely, you have to wonder, why is this $11,000 when someone quoted me $4,500? So if you have this variance in pricing, you want to get more quotes here just so you can know you have a better idea of where does the real plot price lie? And then also get a feel for where are the genuine quotes? I want to stick with the providers that are usually they’re more in the middle of pricing because that’s about where the realistic price is. If you get something that’s too low, you really are taking a chance on quality. There is a chance you find a really low price provider, but there’s also a really good chance that you’re getting an incomplete service or a bad service.

And so an example of an incomplete would be someone giving you the results of a scan instead of an audit. So in that case, they might charge a somewhat weighted price of $1,500, but you would be getting back what you can go out and get for free right now. And with PDF remediation, there are degrees of remediation for PDFs. So there are many, many things you can do to remediate a PDF. And what may be happening on the lower priced services is they’re not offering you full remediation, they’re offering you partial remediation. So let’s say they do an excellent job on what the parts they do remediate, but then they ignore the more difficult tasks. And the more difficult tasks are why the prices from the other providers are higher.

So it is difficult to procure services in accessibility, but this is one of the most common gaps in knowledge that people have and it’s one that where it ends up costing you because if you don’t get it done right the first time, then you’re going to have to do it again. And if you have to get it done again, there’s likely no discount because you went to someone else and they did a little bit of work or they did a bad job and left several issues outstanding and then you go back to do it again. There’s likely no discount on that. So it’s important to keep that in mind. And it’s important to keep in mind that these are not a one to one services. You will not get the same audit from one provider as you will get from another. But what you’re looking for is excellent quality, someone with a good reputation, someone who is detailed and thorough. And so I would look at the details. Is this person being detailed with me? Have they written down everything within scope? Everything that will happen? Do they tell me that they will audit and or remediate per a specific standard? And what is the standard? Have I seen it?

And so part of this is you as the buyer, you have to do research and you have to understand, have a better understanding of what you are procuring and what you will be hopefully getting in return. You have to know this ahead of time. If you know this ahead of time, it’s going to help you. So the more knowledgeable you are, you can also ask questions in the sales demos that will help you understand whether the seller knows what they’re talking about. Because many times if you ask sellers, if you start to ask them and drill down to the real questions, you can find that they might not know everything that they’re selling. And sometimes this could be just a rep not knowing, but other times it can be indicative that the provider really isn’t as thorough or detailed as they need to be for you to get back, for example, a completely accessible document, PDF remediation is there are a lot of providers that do not completely remediate PDFs. That is because PDF remediation is difficult. Not only is it technically complex and there are a lot of different things to know, but it also can involve some parts where input is needed from the person procuring the services. So you might be asked, well, what angle would you like us to take with this part of the remediation? But that would be a good sign if the seller is asking you questions like that, that they’re asking you questions specific to your digital asset. If they’re asking you questions about your document, about your content, that means they’re thinking about that. And that is a good indicator that you will get a stronger, more solid service.

So if you can get an excellent service, you’ve done really well. You’re not looking for the lowest price, you’re looking for a fair price. If you are constantly looking for a low price, you may end up getting a service where you have to redo everything and then it’s just going to end up costing you more. So don’t try I recommend not trying to find the lowest provider or the sales discount or the fiver gig where you’re going to save thousands of dollars. When you’re saving so much money, you have to wonder why you’re saving so much money on the other side, if you are paying thousands and thousands of dollars more than the second highest quote, you have to question, why am I paying this? Is this inflated price? Why is it inflated? So look out for inflated prices because there are no really when you look like let’s just take an accessibility audit. When you look at an accessibility audit, an accessibility audit can only be so good. No one can go above a certain threshold. All you can do is find all of the issues per a particular standard and within the scope of work and list all those issues in a clear fashion, in a clear manner and then all of the other relevant information. That’s all you can do. There is not much more you can do. There are no super audits so keep that in mind that there is a ceiling with these services. All you can do with the PDF is fully remediate it according to whatever technical standards you agree to. That’s it. And so keep that in mind if there are any prices that jump out as really high.

The post The Quality of Digital Accessibility Services is Not the Same, Price is Only One Consideration appeared first on The ADA Book.