Website Accessibility Vendors

With the recent uptick in complaints filed with the feds against many public organizations concerning their websites for not being compliant with accessibility standards, there has been a correlating uptick in knuckle-headed companies trying to cash in on it.

You may have had people cold-call and say “Hey, we just scanned your website and saw you had some major compliance issues!  We have a product to help with that!  Give us money and we will help!”  These people are kinda like the guys that were calling everyone twice a week back in the day when flat screen monitors first came out saying the ONLY way you could ever possibly clean them was with their proprietary magic blend of a cleaning solution (80/20 rubbing alcohol and distilled water) on their extra soft disposable cloth (Viva paper towels) because anything else would cause the icons to smear!

Before you buy their crap, do what the feds do… Go to http://wave.webaim.org/, punch in your website and click the arrow.  If it pops up with errors then fix them!  Most of the time the things that pop up as errors are easily fixed.  Things like actually putting an alternate text in a photo link or similar easy stuff will clear up most of the issues… And you can do that for FREE!

Do the feds dig deeper? You bet.  But generally only if they have a reason to based on the cursory scans of your site.  Fix the red flag errors and clean up the rest the best you can.  It is the right thing to do anyway.  Sometimes we don’t realize how diverse the online community really is and having a reasonably accessible site isn’t that high of a bar to reach…

Besides, tabbing around a website isn’t just helpful for the visually impaired.  It also helps out someone who lost the ball out of their mouse!

Oh… For kicks… Go scan some of the big-dog websites and see how they score to put things in perspective… Still the funniest one to test at webaim is this:

https://www.ada.gov/pcatoolkit/chap5toolkit.htm

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Web Sites and the Americans with Disabilities Act