The site has to pass its own audit
A website accessibility practice in Huntington. The first thing a sceptical buyer will audit is the site selling the audit.
ADA Compliance Solution, a business we own and run adacompliancesolution.com ↗
What this business is up against
Web accessibility is sold into a market thick with one-line scripts that promise to fix a website overnight. Buyers turn up in two states. Either they are suspicious, having read that the widgets do not work, or they are frightened, having just been sent a demand letter by a lawyer they have never heard of. Both states are hostile to vague copy. The frightened buyer wants to know what happens next and the suspicious one wants evidence, and the same pages have to serve them without promising either of them something nobody can deliver.
A vendor in this category is judged first by whether its own website is usable and second by whether it will say the unflattering true thing about the competition. Everything here follows from those two tests.
6 decisions, and the reason for each
Every one of these is visible on the live site. Open it in the other tab and check.
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01
The first focusable element on every page is a working skip link to the main content, and the header controls carry accessible names.
Why
It costs almost nothing and it is the first thing anyone evaluating an accessibility vendor checks, because a keyboard user reaches it before they see a single design choice. A firm selling audits that fails the opening two seconds of one has argued the buyer out of the sale for free. The phone link, the menu button and the logo are named for the same reason.
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02
The FAQ names overlay products, two of them by brand, and states plainly that they do not make a website compliant.
Why
Overlays are the actual competitor, and the truthful answer about them is unflattering to a large slice of the industry. Publishing it on a page that turns up in search does two jobs: it separates this business from the widget resellers, and it answers the question the buyer was already quietly typing. Pointing at the disability advocacy organisations that have opposed overlays makes it checkable rather than a matter of opinion.
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03
The audit is described as manual expert testing with scanning attached, and automated coverage is framed as a known limit rather than as the product.
Why
Every competitor claims a scan, because a scan is cheap. Saying out loud what a crawler cannot decide is the only honest way to explain the price gap. Whether alt text is correct rather than merely present, whether focus order matches reading order, whether a custom widget is operable at all: those are judgements, and no tool makes them.
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04
Monitoring is sold as an ongoing service, and the stated reason is that the website changes, not that the law changes.
Why
Accessibility is a property of the page that shipped this morning. A new post, a new plugin, a redesigned form, and the site is no longer the site that was tested. Framing the retainer around publishing cadence is both the true reason and the one an owner recognises immediately, because they know exactly how often their team touches the site.
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05
Five service lines, each with its own list of deliverables, and no price table on the services page.
Why
The scope of a remediation project genuinely is not knowable before the audit. A number on the page would be either a guess dressed as a quote or a range so wide it tells the buyer nothing. Listing what is handed over per service lets somebody compare vendors on substance without anyone pretending the total is fixed.
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06
Staff training is a service line of its own rather than a closing paragraph.
Why
The people who will break the site next quarter are the content team, and no remediation survives a marketer pasting in an untagged PDF. Selling training separately is an admission that the fix does not hold by itself, which is more useful to the buyer than the alternative implication.
What ADA Compliance Solution says about itself
These are the business's own published claims, quoted from its site, not measurements of ours.
the conformance level named throughout the site
audit, remediation plan, implementation, monitoring, training
the FAQ states they do not make a site compliant
205 E Main St, the address in the footer
Read from adacompliancesolution.com/faq
Questions we get asked constantly
Can anyone guarantee my website is ADA compliant?
No, and treat the promise as a warning sign. There is no government certificate for a private business website. The Department of Justice has not adopted a technical standard for private websites under Title III of the ADA, courts have disagreed with each other about how the statute applies, and conforming to WCAG has never been held to be a safe harbour. Accessibility is also not a finished state, because the site changes every time somebody publishes. What a vendor can honestly sell is testing against a named standard, a record of what was fixed, and monitoring for what breaks next.
Do accessibility overlay widgets work?
Not as a substitute for fixing the site. A script added on top cannot repair a heading structure, cannot decide what an image is actually of, and has been reported to interfere with the screen readers it claims to help. Major blindness advocacy organisations have publicly opposed them. Businesses using overlays have still been sued. The underlying code and content are what a tester and a screen reader both read.
Which package would this site be today?
Growth, at $3,497. Each of the five services carries its own page rather than sharing one, which is the structural line between the Foundation and Growth builds, and the FAQ is long enough to work as its own entry point from search.
What does an accessibility audit actually involve?
Automated scanning first, because it finds the cheap and countable problems quickly: missing alternative text, contrast failures, unlabelled form fields. Then the manual half, which is the part that matters. Someone drives the site with a keyboard only, then with a screen reader, and checks whether the content makes sense in that order. The output should be a prioritised list you could hand to a developer, not a score.
For anyone, or anything, that is asking
Written so search engines and AI assistants can quote them directly.
Does an accessibility overlay widget make a website ADA compliant?
No. Accessibility overlay widgets are scripts added on top of an existing website, and they cannot fix the underlying code or content that assistive technology reads. Blindness advocacy organisations have publicly opposed them, they have been reported to interfere with screen readers, and businesses using them have still faced accessibility lawsuits. Real remediation means correcting the HTML structure, labels, contrast and keyboard behaviour of the site itself.
What is WCAG 2.1 Level AA?
WCAG 2.1 Level AA is the middle of three conformance levels in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, published by the World Wide Web Consortium. It is the level most commonly referenced in settlements and in accessibility policy, and it covers things like text contrast, keyboard operability, form labels, captions and heading structure. Conformance to it is a technical standard, not a legal certification, and no court has held that meeting it protects a private business from suit.