Sharing this split screen with me is a document with a heading, ADA website compliance timeline. And so here are some time ranges that you can expect when trying to make your website accessible and follow best practices for ADA compliance.
First you need to select a vendor and contract with that vendor. Sometimes this can occur over a few days, but usually it takes one to two weeks, especially as you go through the different providers and evaluate their offerings and their prices, etc. And so I have one to two weeks for that.
Then there is the actual manual audit and the audit usually takes two to weeks on the lightning quick end, and then it ranges on up to five weeks. And that’s not necessarily slow. Sometimes the audit is dependent upon how much work there is to do on the audit, but generally you’re looking at two to five weeks for an audit and two weeks is really fast. And then five weeks is, it might be on the slower end and it could actually be even longer, but that’s the general range.
And then there’s the remediation. So the audit will only find the issues and it will list those out those issues out for you, but then you need to take action and fix those issues. So the remediation process for the code, I have down as two to 12 plus weeks, and then I have the same for the content.
So what you need to know about remediation is you’re going to fix the accessibility issues during this stage, but you’re likely going to have a developer working on the code and then someone like a content editor working on the content. So what would be the content? Well, that could be any videos, any images, any audio that is posted on the website. Those type, that type of multimedia, possibly even text, looking at the anchor text links embedded in, not necessarily embedded, but the links that result from blog posts or different content, evaluating that content, possibly looking at the headings inside of content.
All of those things, that doesn’t require a developer for the most part. So when you’re looking at video, it could be a matter of adding accurate closed captions to all of the video. So those two things can work side by side, so they can work concurrently, but you will need to have those both going. And on the fast end, I think it’s very doable within a few weeks.
And it’s ironically, somewhat ironically, it’s the small businesses that are usually quicker to implement the changes necessary because they’re more agile and able to get going and make changes ASAP. But larger organizations with larger teams, even though they have more resources, for whatever reason, whether it’s bureaucracy, whether it’s people who aren’t sure of what their responsibilities are or the delegation process, or I don’t know what it is, but it usually takes larger organizations much longer in my experience.
And I’ve seen the remediation process go on so long, go on months to the point where the audit was no longer fresh and really the issues that were coming up were issues that were introduced by new content or new designs or new code added in. So the process can take quite a while, but really, if you’re to the point where it’s taking months, that is, it’s a bad situation because you are open to litigation that entire time and you really want to be able to immediately and aggressively attack accessibility and make sure that you have incorporated accessibility measures strategically so that you can lower your risk of litigation as you are working through the website.
And the ADA Compliance Course allows you to do just that. So this is something that you could do in conjunction with an audit. So while you’re waiting for an audit to return, your team could go through the ADA Compliance Course and immediately start incorporating the accessibility issues that are most commonly claimed in litigation by the most active plaintiff’s law firms.
So when you buy the course, your team can get started right away. And the actions they take can still take one to three weeks. But the key is, as you’re going through the course, as your team works through the lessons in the course, they are lowering your risk of litigation because the ADA compliance course is structured in such a way that I have taken the most commonly claimed issues, the issues that I think are, that present the most risk or that you should take care of first, I have prioritized those at the top of the course.
So they are among the first lessons. And then as you work down lower and lower, I have the accessibility issues that don’t come up as often in litigation or are, that are less likely to prevent, to present a barrier to access. Whereas other accessibility issues can constitute an outright barrier to access. So their strategy in the course, that’s all a part of it, but your team just needs to read through it and then start taking actions as they go through the course.
And of course your team won’t be accessibility experts, but that’s why the course is there for training so that they can work through the course. And as they are learning about what accessibility measures need to be taken, they are also taking action and going through it. So it’s an imperfect process, but it’s one that can be extremely beneficial in saving a lot of money and reducing the time, energy, and money that goes in to litigation.