Affordable Website Accessibility: Cheapest Options for ADA Compliance (Small Businesses)

As of January 2023, if you get price quotes from the top website accessibility companies, you’re staring at a minimum $10,000 starting price tag for accessibility services.

But that’s beyond of the budget for small businesses (and even bigger operations).

Let’s go over more affordable options.

ADA Compliance Course

The ADA Compliance Course not only costs less than most options — it’s actually better because it’s the blueprint on exactly what to do to improve accessibility and reduce your risk of a lawsuit.

The ADA Compliance Course costs less than $1,000 and trains your team (e.g., your developer and content manager) on ADA compliance best practices and how to find (audit) and fix (remediate) the most commonly claimed accessibility issues in litigation.

Whereas most legitimate services take months before you can actually make headway, the ADA Compliance Course will allow your team to intelligently start fixing issues right away.

You can learn more about the ADA Compliance Course at adacompliance.net.

Overlays

Overlays are touted as “solutions” for web accessibility and ADA compliance but accessibility professionals have proven that overlays not only don’t make websites accessible, but they don’t stop lawsuits.

Accessibility overlay widgets are cheaper at $0-$99/month but, again, they don’t make your website accessible / ADA compliant and they don’t prevent litigation because they don’t actually change the code or content of your website.

Forward your domain over to a Facebook page

Facebook business pages are built with the idea of trying to supplant websites. Facebook also provides tremendous insulation against demand letters and their pages are fairly accessible.

If your website doesn’t fare well in Google rankings, why not lean on Facebook for the time being?

Or you could delete your website altogether but forwarding it to a social platform such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. seems like a better alternative.

Agency and Freelance Audit Services

There are also smaller accessibility agencies that offer a single WCAG 2.1 AA manual audit ala carte.

The price for a website accessibility audit will be lower but nothing extra will be included (e.g., technical support, etc.).

Before you hire an agency, research the service.

Two helpful tips are

1) Don’t hire a digital marketing agency that isn’t focused on accessibility (e.g., they’re also trying to sell you SEO and social media services)

2) Don’t hire overlay vendors even if they claim they’ll manually audit / fix your website. Overlay vendors are not trustworthy.

Use a Wordpress “Accessibility Ready” theme

If your website isn’t tethered to custom design and dynamic functions, an accessible WP theme is a quick and affordable option although you will have to account for all content you upload (e.g., text, images, audio, video, etc.) and customizations you make.

There are many accessible themes on the market, just make sure the theme you use is actually WCAG conformant out of the box and the creators are not lazily throwing the accessibility card as a sales booster.