Q: Who’s responsible for our website’s accessibility?

Having an accessible website is a good business practice and a legal mandate. The two leading accessibility guidelines that oversee website requirements are detailed in the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). Whether you have a mandate to meet WCAG 2.1 AAA accessibility or are taking steps to safeguard your investment against future complaints or accessibility lawsuits, we’ll help you establish the best practices you’ll need to develop long-term website compliance and accessibility requirements.

While our standard website development process has evolved with accessibility best-practices in mind, compliance assurance can be established by engaging a third-party software or service. We commonly help our website clients achieve accessibility compliance by using an inexpensive and easy-to-deploy third-party tool like accessiBe. Where a greater investment is warranted, we can engage a third-party accessibility agency that specializes in doing automated and/or human audits of your site. These audits typically generate a list of accessibility flags for Windmill Strategy’s team to remediate in order to meet the desired level of compliance.

In any case, compliance can only be guaranteed at a single point in time, as any change after the compliance is met would need to undergo the same auditing and remediation process. It’s a very complex requirement, and as such, our role is to facilitate and implement accessibility solutions. Only your legal team can tell you what level of compliance you must attain, and only specialized accessibility engineers can guarantee the truest form of accessibility compliance. The responsibility ultimately falls onto you, the website owner, and your legal team to make sure you follow accessibility guidelines. Windmill is able to assist with implementation on a range of low to high investment.