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

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 it’s customers?

I wish I could tell you that the exponential increase in demand for web accessibility has been a result of everyone coming to understand that business owners and people with disabilities have so much to mutually gain from this endeavor.

Frankly, ADA compliance lawsuits are on nothing short of an intense rise. 200% year over year, with reports of 10’s of thousands of demand letters and lawsuits, targeting businesses of all sizes. At first, only the largest of enterprises and government institutions were legally pressured to become accessible, which makes sense. One of the most significant shifts in the legal climate was when the DOJ officially affirmed that all websites are considered public accommodations. Many did not think for a second that it will ever happen to them, but that was not the case at all.

In fact, 2019 ended up tripling 2018 in the number of papers served. This means that for every business hour in 2019, a business was served for not being web accessible. You will also find that in almost every situation, the plaintiff wins the case on its merits because it’s a strict liability law and judges are often understandably sympathetic to people with disabilities who really only want equal rights. There is virtually no chance of winning an ADA case when you’re not compliant. The lawyers simply advise their clients to write a check since there is no point in fighting it.

A quick example of what’s going on as well: A visually impaired woman from Broward County, Florida sued 175 business owners several of which closed down as a result.

Now in the 2020 Covid era, we’re seeing those in quarantine have less access to physical locations and amenities, and they are finding more difficulty in accessing the web for essential services.

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

1. Manual Remediation- Experts in web accessibility conform your website in favor of accessibility to achieve a high level of 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 ongoing compliance. Websites under 1,000 pages can cost $15K per year not including the maintenance. Not to mention it takes 4-26 weeks to make your website compliant (the first time).

2. Free or low-cost widgets 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 work on your site from then on you may have to hire them again to make it compliant again.

3. Artificial Intelligence (AI) – Fully automated from audit to ongoing maintenance. Includes CSS adjustments for visual impairments, epilepsy, color blindness, cognitive and learning disabilities by way of the search bar for definitions. It also includes the back end 75% of the WCAG requirements which include: assistive technology optimization, aria attributes, 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.