Why Your Site Needs to be ADA-Compliant

Let’s face it – it’s 2022, and everyone should be included. By making your website accessible for all, you’re giving equal opportunity to access crucial information that significantly helps our everyday lives.

- 20% of the population identify as People with Disabilities (PWDs)
- But only 2% of the internet is accessible

Peace of mind from litigation:

We currently protect over 100K clients from mom-and-pop to 100 from the Fortune 1,000 lists. There hasn’t been one single client that has been successfully sued due to using our tool. In addition, our Litigation Support Package has helped over 4,500 clients resolve legal matters relating to accessibility quickly and easily.

Opportunity & Market:

The CDC reports that 61 million Americans are registered as disabled, with an average annual spending power of 490 billion dollars. There are 1.3 billion people within the disabled community, which has an annual spending power of 8 trillion dollars and is growing due to population growth.

Brand Exposure & Awareness:

Making your website accessible means that you’re now reaching out to 20% more of the population that was not there before by default. It also means that more people will be talking about your company and attracted to your inclusive ethos. Wouldn’t you want to buy a product or service from an ethically responsible business that cares about its customers?

The Accessibility Gap

Accessible coded websites from the get-go is an amazing idea, but in reality – CMS is booming – the vast majority of websites are created through “Drag & Drop,” so there is no code even to address…

Education for the future is essential so coders and business owners get their websites accessible from the get-go. However, 350 million existing websites live now—no chance to go back and get them all accessible manually.

Business owners are key in this transition. But they lack the expertise and resources needed. They can’t be accessibility experts; they can’t afford ongoing costly projects, mainly because the website usually costs less than making it accessible.

Manually, it’s a long and probably unrealistic mission. However, PWDs need and deserve access now. Not in 50 years. And maybe never. As the gap will only get bigger.

Competition: accessiBe vs. The Rest

When it comes to ADA compliance, the Competitive Landscape is comprised of three different types of solutions out there:

Manual Remediation– Experts in web accessibility confirm your website in favor of accessibility to achieve high compliance. This increases the cost of the website by an average of 200% extra. This also does not include the cost of the audit and ongoing maintenance to ensure continuous compliance. Websites under 1,000 pages can cost $15K annually, not including maintenance. It takes 4-26 weeks to make your website compliant (the first time).
Free or low-cost widgets like Userway and other generic alternatives: These only handle CSS adjustments for low visual impairments and epilepsy and only touch upon up to 25% of the WCAG requirements (means inaccessible).

You have to hire someone to work on the site to get it up to compliance, and if you have worked on your site from then on, you may have to hire them again to make it compliant.

accessiBe – Fully automated from audit to ongoing maintenance. CSS adjustments for visual impairments, epilepsy, color blindness, and cognitive and learning disabilities through the search bar for definitions. It also consists of the back end of 75% of the WCAG requirements, which include: assistive technology optimization, aria attributes, and elemental structural roles, and provides alt tags for images using OCR and IRIS Ai technologies. If this is used and changes are made to the site, the proprietary AI adjusts to make it more compliant.

It eliminates paying a skilled developer to fix the site. On average, it takes another 40 hours to get the site to pass a compliance check, but it’s not guaranteed. Then there is the issue that it can fall out of compliance a week later due to editing and updates by the site owner. Websites are often dynamic and can change frequently.

With accessiBe, your annual license fee is less than a tenth of the cost of initial manual remediation and about a hundredth of ongoing maintenance yearly.

AccessiBe works the way it does, and billing works the way it does to address the 98% of SMBs that cannot afford manual accessibility work. We believe every website should provide equal access to all, but it’s not feasible for most business owners to accomplish this independently. That’s why we’ve partnered with accessiBe.