ADA Website Accessibility Audit & Remediation
WCAG-aligned testing, prioritized findings, and code-level remediation. No overlays. No magic widgets. No promises we can't keep.
What's actually happening
ADA Title III web accessibility lawsuits and demand letters remain at high levels in California. The standard most commonly cited is WCAG 2.1 Level AA, the same standard the U.S. Department of Justice referenced in its 2024 Title II final rule. The Department doesn't require any specific tool, plugin, or vendor. It requires that people with disabilities can actually use your website.
Most claims target the same recurring set of issues: missing alternative text on images, insufficient color contrast, keyboard traps, unlabeled form fields, inaccessible navigation menus, dialogs that can't be dismissed without a mouse, and broken focus order. None of these are exotic. All of them are fixable.
None of them are resolved by the kind of accessibility overlay widget that appears in the corner of a page and claims to fix your site automatically. Those products have been the subject of their own lawsuits, and disability rights organizations have publicly rejected them.
Worried your website could be next? An audit tells you where your site actually stands against the current standard, which problems matter most, and what it would cost to address them. You get a prioritized plan and a real number to budget against, rather than a guess.
Request Your ADA Website Accessibility Audit & Remediation Consultation!
What We Do
How audits are scoped
We don't publish a flat fee, because a five-page nonprofit site and a two-hundred-page membership site are not the same job, and pricing them the same would mean overcharging one and underserving the other.
What drives the scope:
- How many pages need testing. Most accessibility barriers live in your theme and templates rather than in individual pages, so we test a representative set rather than every page.
- How many distinct templates and layouts the site uses. A site with one page design is faster to assess than one with eight.
- How much interactive functionality is involved. Booking flows, member logins, carts, filters, calendars, and multi-step forms each need separate hands-on testing.
- Which third-party components are embedded. Event calendars, booking widgets, payment tools, and form builders often carry accessibility problems that originate outside your own code.
- Whether a demand letter is already in play. Active matters are handled on a priority schedule.
Every engagement is quoted in writing before any work begins, after a short scoping call and a look at your site. There are no hourly surprises.
Focused Accessibility Review
A hands-on review of your highest-traffic pages, typically the five to ten pages where most visitors actually land. Best suited to smaller sites, to organizations working toward accessibility on a phased budget, and to anyone who wants a clear-eyed picture of where they stand before committing to a full engagement.
Because most issues originate in shared templates and components, a focused review on the right pages surfaces the majority of what affects the rest of the site.
Full Site Accessibility Audit
Comprehensive manual testing across every distinct template, page type, and interactive flow on the site, paired with a site-wide automated scan. Appropriate for larger sites, for organizations with a legal or procurement requirement to document their position, and for any site where accessibility has never been formally assessed.
What every audit includes
Whichever scope you choose, you receive:
- A full report with every issue mapped to a specific WCAG success criterion
- Severity prioritization across Critical, High, Medium, and Low
- Screenshots, code references, and remediation guidance for each issue
- A site-wide automated scan showing how far each issue reaches beyond the pages tested by hand
- An executive summary written for board or leadership review
- A scoped remediation quote based on what was actually found
Testing covers:
- Screen reader compatibility on desktop and mobile
- Keyboard-only navigation, focus order, and focus visibility
- Color contrast and the use of color to convey meaning
- Heading hierarchy, reading order, and document structure
- ARIA roles, labels, landmarks, and semantics
- Form field labeling, instructions, validation, and error handling
- Menus, dropdowns, dialogs, and interactive components
- Link purpose and clarity out of context
- Browser zoom, reflow, and text spacing
We test against WCAG 2.1 Level AA, which is the benchmark courts and the Department of Justice have relied on, and against the additional criteria introduced in WCAG 2.2 where they apply to your site.
Typical turnaround is two to three weeks from kickoff.
Remediation
Once the audit is complete, we quote the remediation work based on the actual count, complexity, and location of what was found. Remediation commonly runs several times the cost of the audit itself, which is why we scope it from findings rather than selling a package before anyone knows what's wrong.
Remediation is mostly hands-on development. Every site is built differently, and fixes have to match your actual code, theme, plugins, and content. AI assists with specific repetitive tasks such as drafting alternative text and checking link attributes, but the substance of the work is manual.
When remediation is complete, we retest the corrected items by hand and rerun the same site-wide scan, so the before and after comparison is documented for your records as part of a good-faith effort.
Why the audit is mostly manual
Automated scanners test code. They are good at finding issues with a clear technical signature: missing alternative text, duplicate element identifiers, and color combinations that fall below the required contrast ratio. What they cannot do is use your website.
No automated tool, at any price, can determine whether:
- a visitor can reach and operate every control using only a keyboard
- the focus indicator stays visible as it moves through the page
- the tab order follows the visual order of the page
- a dialog can be closed without a mouse
- link text means anything out of context, such as "click here" or "read more"
- the page still works at 200% zoom or with increased text spacing
- information conveyed by color alone is available some other way
- a screen reader announces changes when content updates
- form error messages tell the user how to fix the problem
Every one of those requires a person navigating your site with a keyboard and with assistive technology. That is where the audit budget goes, and it is why a website can return a clean automated scan and still be unusable for someone who depends on those things.
We run automated scanning too, across the whole site, because it shows how far each issue reaches and tells us where a single template fix resolves hundreds of instances. It is a coverage tool. It is not the assessment.
What we don't do
- We don't issue legal certifications or compliance guarantees. Nobody can. Accessibility is an ongoing state rather than a one-time certificate, and any vendor selling a "guaranteed compliant" badge is selling something that doesn't legally exist.
- We don't install overlays. Accessibility overlay widgets do not fix the underlying code, have failed to prevent lawsuits, and have been formally rejected by leading disability rights organizations.
- We don't hand you a raw automated scan and call it an audit. A scan report is a list of code warnings. An audit tells you which barriers actually stop people, which ones matter most, and what to do about them.
- We don't quote remediation before the audit. Anyone who prices the fix before knowing what's broken is guessing, and that guess tends to move once work begins.
- We don't audit native mobile apps under this service. Websites only. Mobile apps can be quoted separately.
- We don't provide legal advice. If you've received a demand letter or lawsuit, contact a qualified attorney before doing anything else.
Local Resources
Provided for information only. These are not endorsements, and we have no affiliation with any of them.
- U.S. Department of Justice, ada.gov web guidance. Covers ADA obligations for private businesses under Title III and government entities under Title II.
- Pacific ADA Center, adapacific.org, (800) 949-4232. A federally funded technical assistance center serving California and the western region.
- W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, the international technical standard cited in U.S. litigation and in the Department of Justice's 2024 rule.
- WebAIM, a respected accessibility resource from Utah State University, including a free contrast checker and the WAVE evaluation tool.
- Sonoma County Bar Association Lawyer Referral Service, (707) 546-5297. Connects residents and businesses with attorneys, including those experienced in ADA litigation. An intake fee applies and covers the initial consultation.
If we built your website
Building a website to full WCAG Level AA conformance from the ground up is a specialized engagement, and it costs substantially more than a standard small business website build. The difference reflects the audit, design adjustments, custom development, accessibility-focused QA, and remediation cycles required to ship a site that meets the standard end to end.
This has always been the case. Most small business website packages, at RAD and at virtually every other agency serving the same market, do not include WCAG Level AA conformance as a default inclusion, because the price point would put a website out of reach for most small businesses. Clients who specifically need a conforming build scope it as a separate project at the time of engagement.
If your site was scoped as a standard build, which is how the large majority of small business sites are scoped, and you now need it brought in line with WCAG, that's the same accessibility engagement that would apply to any site, regardless of who built it or when. The audit identifies what needs to change, the remediation quote scopes the work, and we move forward from there. Existing RAD clients engage these services on the same terms as any other client, often with priority scheduling.
Ready to reduce your risk?
We test against the standards California courts actually reference, prioritize findings by severity, and quote real remediation costs based on what we find.
FAQs
What is WCAG Level AA?
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines are the W3C standard built on four principles: content should be perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust. Level AA is the middle of three conformance levels and is the one courts and the Department of Justice treat as the practical benchmark, even though ADA Title III does not formally adopt it by regulation. WCAG 2.1 is the version most commonly cited. WCAG 2.2 is the current version and adds criteria addressing focus visibility, target size, and authentication.
Does the ADA apply to my website if I don't have a physical storefront?
Usually yes. Courts have widely treated business websites as places of public accommodation, and online-only businesses have faced claims. Whether it applies in your specific circumstances is a legal question for an attorney, not for us.
Can a business be sued without anyone ever complaining?
Yes, and this is the most common pattern. Serial plaintiffs and the firms that work with them run automated scans across large numbers of websites to identify targets, then send demand letters, often without any person having attempted to use the site.
We can show you what that looks like. A free, publicly available scanner recently returned roughly 780 findings across 64 pages of a client site in about twelve minutes, with no human involvement at any point. That is how the list of targets gets built, and it is also why a clean automated scan means less than it appears, in both directions.
Why aren't accessibility overlays enough?
Overlay products add a control panel on top of your website. They do not fix the underlying code that assistive technology actually reads. The National Federation of the Blind has formally rejected them, hundreds of accessibility professionals have signed public statements opposing them, and at least one overlay vendor has been sued for misrepresenting what its product does. Sites running overlays have been sued.
What does an audit cost?
It depends on the size of your site, how many distinct templates and layouts it uses, and how much interactive functionality needs hands-on testing. We quote every engagement in writing after a short scoping call, before any work begins. If you'd like a ballpark before that conversation, send us your website address and we'll give you one.
Will my website look different afterward?
Usually not noticeably. Most remediation happens in code that visitors never see. Color contrast corrections are the common exception, since raising contrast means changing a color somewhere. Where a visible change is needed, we bring you the options before making it, so your branding stays intact.
Ready to start?
If you've received a demand letter, speak to an attorney first.
Otherwise, send us your website address. We'll take a look, tell you honestly what we see, and quote the audit based on what your site actually needs. No overlays, no instant-compliance widgets, and no guarantees that nobody can keep.
Important Notice - This page describes technical services offered by RAD Web Marketing to help businesses reduce risk under current California accessibility and privacy enforcement. It is not legal advice and is not a substitute for advice from a qualified attorney. RAD Web Marketing is a web development and digital marketing agency, not a law firm. Compliance is not a one-time event. The legal landscape, WCAG criteria, plaintiff theories, and enforcement patterns change continuously. Our services reduce risk at a point in time, based on the standards and best practices in effect when the work is performed. They do not eliminate risk, prevent demand letters or lawsuits, or constitute legal certification of compliance under the ADA, CIPA, CCPA, CPRA, UCL, CDAFA, or any other state or federal law. Any vendor claiming otherwise is misrepresenting what is technically and legally deliverable. Ongoing compliance depends on factors outside our control, including content you add to your site after our work is complete, third-party tools and integrations you connect later, plugin and platform updates, and changes in applicable law or its judicial interpretation. We recommend periodic re-audits and continued engagement with qualified legal counsel. If you have received a demand letter, lawsuit, or formal complaint, contact a qualified attorney before engaging any remediation vendor, including us.