I recently discovered that there is an entire marketplace on Fiverr for digital accessibility services.
So there are audits being offered, remediation services are being offered, I even saw that VPAT- a VPAT service is being offered.
And I wouldn’t use any of the gigs from Fiverr and so here is why.
One, the majority of website accessibility services involves the use of installing and plugin or overlay for accessibility; you know that overlays don’t work.
The prices don’t match the services and so I’m going to read off from one actually right now, I have it pulled up.
And it says, up to 100 page ADA compliance according to WCAG 2.0 / 2.1 level AA or AAA, $500.00.
I don’t care where in the world you are sourcing from, that is- that price is not going to happen so obviously you are not going to get what is being described here.
So – and this is the case with with a large amount of gigs – is there’s an over promise and the delivery won’t even be .1% of what they’re promising.
Continuing back, buyers don’t know what they’re receiving.
So you being the buyer you being the potential person looking for accessibility services, if you receive services from these freelancers you have no idea what you’re getting.
You might get e-mail support, you might get revisions, you might get nice reports. but you don’t know whether they’re of good quality or not.
So let’s take let’s take PDF remediation.
PDF accessibility is a very specialized skill set
And you won’t know, if you send a document to one of these freelancers, you have no idea if what you’re getting back is actually accessible.
And so PDF accessibility also it- it increases in complexity and difficulty along with the document.
So there are some basic things you can do for PDF accessibility, but I guarantee you the more advanced things, the more the- even the intermediate things that you can do for PDF accessibility are not going to be provided for on these gigs.
So the reviews – even if- and I see some top rated sellers on here I see some great reviews some five star reviews – the reviews are worthless.
So even if someone has 100 5-star reviews, they’re worthless that doesn’t it doesn’t mean anything.
Because, again, the buyers don’t know what they’re getting.
And I think the best case scenario is you get scan results resold as an audit.
So I- what’s typically happening and a large portion of these gigs is that you are being sold an audit and what is being happening what is happening is the freelancer is turning around and putting your website, your page URL into WAVE and then returning those scan results as an audit.
So at least in that case you get the scan results and they are helpful but that is not an audit.
And you can- by the way you can do that yourself for free, you don’t need to hire someone to do that for you.
So reading through these gigs, again a lot of them talk about installing a widget or a toolbar for you, those are worthless.
It’s also- let’s see well and- and one more thing and just the very fact that many of these freelancers they don’t even know the proper terminology, tells you a lot.
Here’s one from a US seller: I will 508 your course or documents.
You know, if you can’t even bother to write correctly and describe your gig correctly then that can tell you what you can expect from the gig.
So I understand there’s SSO aspect of this, but you can you can work in SEO while still using fairly correct terminology.
So I wouldn’t use any of the services from Fiverr.