Working with a consultant agency in Spring of 2020, the company in question maintained numerous websites which were not previously evaluated for ADA, nor WACG, compliance. In order to decrease the risk of legal action, said company requested a review of their websites with recommendations on next steps based off of my findings. After discussions with the company’s team, two main questions were identified that directed the approach of the review: “At what point do the websites meet minimum legal standards for ADA compliance?” and “How can the necessary updates be prioritized in order to create the fastest positive impact with minimal risk to website uptime?”

I undertook this initiative as a one person team. As the company’s initial approach to ADA was limited in scope, I determined that supplemental information would be provided for future reference. My intent was to facilitate understanding of the results of the review and allow the consultant agency to utilize this information to avoid legal risks in the future.

My first steps for the review were to collect preparatory research on up-to-date standards for ADA compliance, thresholds of legality, areas of highest impact towards the experience of users, and possible tools to automate webpage evaluation. Both ADA and WCAG 2.1 guidelines were the standards for all evaluations. Results of my initial research suggested that users are most impacted by webpage issues such as missing alternate text, scripts that do not support JavaScript, and low contrast text.

I used a combination of a website directory link counter and a WCAG 2.1 webpage evaluator to help streamline and automate the evaluation process. I double checked these findings through manual website navigation and UI code reviews. I recorded, per webpage, the number of errors, their type, and their overall user impact. My records were then organized and evaluated across all webpages per website, as well as across all websites. The intent of these data breakdowns was to better view the highest incidents of error types so that I could recommend which areas could benefit from more QA assistance prior to website launches. Additionally, my findings were used to prioritize my proposals for the next steps in alleviating and fixing these errors.

I discovered trends which provided answers to minimum legality and quickest impact towards compliance with low website downtime. The highest priority of these were two points. First, all websites used the same base template, and as a result, exhibited the same errors within the same templated areas. Upon discussing my findings with the team, we decided that changes to the main template would efficiently update all websites with only a need for minor QA to ensure no specific website was negatively impacted. Second, the bulk of the discovered errors were missing or duplicated alt text. Providing fixes for these would eliminate more than half of all errors discovered, and would provide the largest positive impact towards legality with minimum risk to website downtime.

My recommendations to the team were to prioritize template updates before all other development to prevent any future websites using said template from creating additional work. This included, if technically feasible, providing updates on all areas where missing or duplicate alternative texts were impacting the users’ experience. My intent with this approach was to provide an efficient way to not only prevent rework, but to also protect the company from legal action by allowing them to update the bulk of the non-compliance as fast as possible. Once these areas were complete, the team could continue updating the template on areas which were recorded as having errors. Ideally, these would be prioritized from most to least common with an minimum occurrence of at least 4%, with less common errors corrected as time allowed. I believed further work would need to be done on individual websites to address specific non-compliance that was not caused by the template. However, most of these websites were around 10 years aged and, when discussed with the company team, were already in evaluation for retirement within the next few months. We agreed that retirement would be beneficial in reducing overall work and risk to the company.

A few months later, per my recommendations, the company either retired, or withdrew for modernizing, the bulk of their websites, and had completed most of the work updating their website template for the remaining ones.