Website Accessibility & Remediation • Red Kite Creative

Did you know that over 1 billion people in the world have some kind of disability? And about 25% of all adults in the U.S. do? Those U.S. adults have about $200 billion in discretionary income – every year.

If your website’s not accessible, it’s kind of like putting an obstacle course in front of your brick-and-mortar store that only 75% of U.S. adults can get through. No business owner in their right mind would do that – would they?

Updating your website so that it’s accessible is not just the right thing to do. When your website is easier to use, it’s easier to use for everyone. Visitors will tend to stay on your site longer, have fewer bounces, and generate more conversions.

By June 2025, most businesses in the EU will be required to have accessible websites.

We don’t have a law like this in the U.S. – yet. But over 4,600 lawsuits were filed here in 2023 against inaccessible websites. That number is going to go up. Remember GDPR and the impact that had on U.S. business websites?

Making a website accessible to everyone can be tedious, time-consuming, and expensive. But doing nothing about accessibility makes your site an easy target for legal action. The average cost of an accessibility lawsuit to a small business in the U.S. is $19,000-$45,000 (including attorneys, law firm fees, and remediation).

Resorting to an accessibility overlay can make you an even more tempting target; you’re admitting you knew there was a problem with your website, but didn’t take any real action (because overlays don’t actually fix anything).

The Benefits of Being Accessible

Making your website more accessible will not only make it a less attractive target for lawsuits. There are other positive benefits including:

More people can use your website! More potential customers!
A better user experience benefits everyone, not just disabled people.
It shows that your business cares about people with disabilities, and people in general. It’s simply the right thing to do.
Many accessibility improvements are also best practices for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and can reduce bounces, increase time on site, and increase conversions.

Accessibility & Remediation: Step-by-Step to a More Inclusive Website

Our automated assessment covers more than 40 points, and our manual, hands-on remediation work can be done over time to fit your budget.

Our affordable accessibility services can get you about 90% of the way to full compliance. That usually requires an in-depth manual assessment and testing and typically starts at around $6,000 – even for a small website.

After our remediation when your site is in the monitoring stage, you’ll be able to see accessibility issues when you add new content and fix them at the same time – no waiting around required. See an example beside/below.

The Audit creates a prioritized Open Issues list.

Fast-track the global issues for quick wins.

See problems exactly where they exist in pages.

See needed fixes in the page editor, too.

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Accessibility is Good for Your Business!

01.

More Customers!

An accessible website helps people with disabilities to access and interact with your site. By being inclusive, you tap into a bigger customer base to increase your sales and conversions.

02.

Regulatory Compliance.

Having an accessible website helps reduce the risk of lawsuits and improves compliance with state and federal accessibility laws which are steadily evolving.

03.

Better User Experience.

Accessibility features not only benefit users with disabilities but also enhance the overall user experience (UX) for everyone who visits your site.

04.

It’s Good for SEO.

Many accessibility practices overlap with SEO best practices. For instance, descriptive headings and ALT text for images can boost rankings and organic search traffic.

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Budget-friendly accessibility: efficiency meets inclusivity.

Your data stays in-house and under your control.

Protect your customer data and business IP. The testing tool is loaded on your site and sends no code or data externally.

No overlay “bandages” that impact load time.

Get recommendations for real code fixes with a tool that doesn’t load on the front end of your site and slow down page loading. See more below.

Find issues in bulk and prioritize fixes fast.

Scan an entire website in a few minutes and get a prioritized list of issues that need attention – and what improvements will have the biggest impact.

Identify & fix errors before you publish new content.

See accessibility issues right in the post editor and fix problems as you enter or edit content. No waiting required.

Retain your audit history.

You’ll have a history of your progress during remediation and will be able to quickly respond to legal complaints with reports showing improvements.

Move steadily toward compliance.

Prioritized fix-it lists help you work toward WCAG 2.1 compliance with your budget in mind. Reduce risk of lawsuits as your site becomes more accessible.

“I already use an accessibility overlay, isn’t that good enough?”

Accessibility overlays are tools that promise a quick solution by using AI to attempt to fix accessibility problems on pages as they load. While they can make some improvements, like providing a toolbar for users to adjust text size or contrast, they don’t actually fix accessibility problems in the code¹, giving website owners a false sense of security. They can slow down page loading, too.

Some overlays can even make your site less accessible by introducing bugs or interfering with tools that disabled users already have, like screen readers².

Overlays have been cited in a number of lawsuits. In 2023, 30% of all U.S. accessibility lawsuits involved accessibility overlays³. Instead of using overlays, we recommend a combination of automatic and manual assessments to find and improve your site’s accessibility.

¹https://www.accessibility.works/blog/avoid-accessibility-overlay-tools-toolbar-plugins/

² https://www.coloradovirtuallibrary.org/learning/edit/the-skinny-on-accessibility-overlays/#:~:text=While%20many%20overlay%20providers%20promise,for%20accessibility%20as%20not%20effective

³ https://www.accessibility.works/blog/2023-ada-website-lawsuits-legal-statistics/#:~:text=According%20to%20UsableNet%2C%202023%20saw,using%20an%20overlay%20were%20sued

How It Works…

There are no cookie-cutter plans. We can jump in and address as many problems as quickly as possible, or spread fixes out over a longer time. It all depends upon your budget and preferences.

Step 1 – Accessibility Audit

Our Discovery Phase, which reveals the accessibility issues on your website. Based on the results, we’ll develop a plan for a 1-time charge for immediate fixes for the most egregious problems, then ongoing monthly remediation to work on the remaining issues until complete. $149.

Step 2 – Urgent Accessibility Fixes

We’ll quickly address the most serious issues raised by your audit. $500 for half day / $1000 for full day. We’ll recommend one or the other based on the number of problems found – the more problems fixed up front, the less time needed in Step 3. When complete, we’ll add an Accessibility Statement to your website.

Step 3 – Monthly Remediation

We’ll work with you on a remediation budget for fixing the remaining low-level errors and warnings over time. Every site is different, and pricing depends on your budget and the number and complexity of accessibility issues on your website. Starts at $250/mo for up to 2 hours of fixes but we can do as much as you like, up to 10 hours/mo.

Step 4 – Monitoring

Optional, but recommended. Keep full access to pre-publication checks for edits and new content, in-site audit results and tools, rescans, keyboard navigation checks. Prices vary depending on the type of site – from $180/qtr for brochure sites to $180+ per month for ecommerce, membership sites or busy blogs.

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Frequently-asked Questions

Website accessibility means making your website usable for as many people as possible, including those with disabilities. This includes ensuring that users who rely on screen readers, need larger text, or navigate using keyboard shortcuts can use your site just as easily as anyone else.

First, it’s about fairness – it’s simply the right thing to do; everyone deserves to use your website. Second, it makes good business sense. More accessible websites reach a wider audience, improving potential customer engagement. Plus, it helps protect your business from legal risks associated with non-compliance with accessibility laws.

In the U.S., the main law is the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), a civil rights law that was enacted in 1990 to prohibit discrimination against individuals with disabilities in all areas of public life, including jobs, schools, transportation, and all public and private places that are open to the general public. While it doesn’t mention websites directly, court cases have interpreted it to apply to websites, too.

The interpretation of the ADA in these cases means that businesses, especially those with a significant online presence or those that operate a website in addition to physical locations, must prioritize website accessibility. They should aim to comply with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), which are the widely recognized standards for web accessibility.

If you’re the DIY type, start with online tools that scan your website for accessibility issues, like WAVE or AXE. They can identify some of the more common issues. However, these tools definitely don’t catch everything, so consider getting an Accessibility Audit from Red Kite for a more thorough review.

Very common issues include text that’s hard to read because it’s too small or doesn’t contrast with the background; images without ALT text (so screen readers can describe them to visually impaired users); and websites that can’t be navigated by using a keyboard.

You can start by increasing text contrast and size if necessary, adding text descriptions to images (ALT text), ensuring your site can be fully navigated with a keyboard, and including captions or transcripts for videos. Making your website accessible is an ongoing process, but these steps can greatly improve accessibility – they are truly low-hanging fruit.

It sure does. Accessibility improvements, like clearer headings, better content structure, easy-to-read fonts, alternative text for images, and better link descriptions, also help search engines understand and rank your site better.

It can vary a lot. It depends your website’s current state, size and complexity. Making accessibility a priority right from the start of website design can save costs later on for sure. While there might be some upfront investment, the potential benefits in audience reach and legal compliance usually outweigh these costs.

For an existing site, remediation to improve accessibility can often be done without requiring a full website re-do. Red Kite’s hands-on remediation services can help you work toward compliance with current laws and best practices at a pace that works with your budget.

Again, it depends. If you have the time to educate yourself on what needs to be done and the staff to do the work, that’s great. Otherwise, consider hiring Red Kite to run a thorough audit to identify 40+ potential types of issues. You’ll have a prioritized list of what needs doing and exactly where the problems lie.

At that point, you can take over. Or you can hire us to work through the list with you prioritizing the global fixes first, then working our way down to more specific and complex items.

“Compliance” means different things based on context. For a small site, it might simply mean ensuring text alternatives are provided for images and that the site can be navigated with a keyboard. For a larger ecommerce site, compliance could require a more extensive overhaul, including ensuring that all parts of the shopping process are fully accessible to users with various disabilities.

Compliance is not a one-time checkbox but an ongoing commitment to accessibility in web design and development.

No automated assessment tool can catch every single issue on a website. Although we manually check and address every issue in our audit results, 100% compliance requires full manual checking by a human and can be quite expensive. We can help you get pretty far along toward WCAG version 2.1, but it’s an ongoing process and we don’t guarantee 100% compliance.

Demonstrating ongoing efforts to improve accessibility, such as implementing key WCAG guidelines, can be beneficial in showing a good faith effort towards compliance. This may be considered favorably in legal circles as it makes your site less appealing and a harder target for accessibility lawsuits.

A website accessibility statement is a public declaration on your website that outlines your commitment to making your site accessible to users with disabilities. This statement serves multiple purposes:

Awareness. It shows your company’s dedication to inclusivity by making your digital content usable for people with a wide range of abilities.
Transparency. It communicates to your visitors the level of accessibility they can expect from your site. This can include information about which standards or guidelines your site aims to follow, such as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).
Legal Protection. Having an accessibility statement can also offer some degree of legal protection. It can demonstrate your effort toward compliance with laws and regulations concerning digital accessibility, such as the ADA in the U.S.
Continuous Improvement. By acknowledging your ongoing efforts, the statement can highlight your commitment to continuously improving accessibility on your site. This often includes a mention of the site’s current compliance level with standards like WCAG and any known exceptions or limitations.

After using our remediation service or fixing the list of problems on your own, you will be able to place an accessibility statement on your site describing your efforts and the website’s accessibility features, linked from the footer on all pages.

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are a great place to start. They provide detailed guidelines on making web content more accessible. The ADA official website and various online resources dedicated to web accessibility are also worth a good look.

Make your site accessible to all. Let’s get started.

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