How to Accurately Budget for Accessibility: Chris Hinds

>> PAOLA GONZALEZ: Welcome, everyone, to WordPress Accessibility Meetup, How to Accurately Budget for Accessibility, with Chris Hinds. Just a few announcements. You can join our Facebook group to connect between meetups, and you can find that at facebook.com/groups/wordpress.accessibility. We talk about anything and everything accessibility in there. Sometimes if you have a question, it’s very likely that someone will have an answer, so it’s a great place to connect. You can also find upcoming events and past recordings in one place, that is at equalizedigital.com/meetup. You can join our email list to get news and events announcements, that is at equalizedigital.com/focus-state. Yes, this meeting is being recorded, saying that again, and you can find it either at the meetup website or you can just get notified on our focus date. You can also tune into our podcast. That is where we release the audio version of the meetup, and also other conversations about accessibility. That is at accessibilitycraft.com. We are seeking additional sponsors for the meetup because the WordPress Foundation does not sponsor that, so we have to go out and look out for sponsors so that we can provide you with live captions, transcript, and ASL whenever available.

If you’re interested in sponsoring the meetup, you can contact me or Amber, who’s usually here but not today, at meetup@equalizedigital.com. That email goes to both of us. Or you can speak to me during the meetup in chat, and I can get you that information as well. Also, if you have suggestions for the meetup, or need any additional accommodations, you can always use that email or use the webinar chat while we’re live. Who are we? We are the organizers of meetup. We are Equalize Digital. We are a mission-driven organization, and a corporate member of the IAAP focused on WordPress accessibility.

You can find us on X or Twitter @equalizedigital. We are proud to mention that we have a live captioning sponsor today, and that is Kinsta. Kinsta provides managed hosting services for WordPress. It is powering 120,000 businesses worldwide, and based on the user reviews, it is the highest-rated managed WordPress host on G2. It has everything you need, including an unbeatable combination of speed, security, and expert support. Powered by Google Cloud and the fastest C3D and C2 servers combined with CDN and edge caching. Your sites are secured with Cloudflare Enterprise, protecting you from DDoS attacks.

All plans include free migrations, and the first month of the starter plans is completely free, so you can try the service risk-free. You can find them on the website at kinsta.com, and you can find them on Twitter or X @kinsta. We always encourage our attendees to thank our meetup sponsors on Twitter or X, however you want to call it, so that they know that we’re doing our job and promoting them. Just a few upcoming events. We have Accessibility Strategy and Goal Setting Workshop with Amber Hinds on Monday, December 16 at 7:00 PM US Central.

We have, in the same time slot, but for next year in January 9th at 10:00 AM Central, Navigating the Future Using WordPress Menu Blocks That Work for Everyone, Michaela Lederman and Eli Frigoli. We have our next January meetup. It’s How D&D Can Improve Accessibility: Using Roleplay During All Phases of Product Development to Better Consider User Experience, with Nick Croft. That is going to be on Monday, January 20th at 7:00 PM Central. Now I am very glad to welcome today’s speakers. Chris Hinds is the COO of Equalize Digital, a company specializing in WordPress accessibility.

He oversees the business development, human resources, and financial operations of the company, and acts as an early-stage accessibility consultant for countless organizations who are looking to create more accessible outcomes with WordPress. Someone very prepared to talk about budgeting today. I’ll leave the room to you, Chris. I’ll stop sharing so that you can get all set up. While you do that, I’m just letting everyone know that if you have any questions during the presentation, please drop them in the Q&A box. It makes it so much easier for us to track them. I’ll leave the floor to you, Chris.

>> CHRIS HINDS: All right. Thank you so much, Paola, for that lovely introduction. Thank you all, all 60-plus of you now, maybe we’ve even hit 70, I can’t see the count anymore, who have decided to be here today. I’m going to do my absolute best to make sure that this is worth your time and worth your attention. We’re going to be talking about, as Paola said, how to accurately budget for accessibility. We’re going to be covering essential products, services, typical costs, and how to run projections. Extending on that, I want to go through some of the things that I’m going to take you through in a little more detail before we dive in.

First we’re going to be covering the key reasons why an organization might have no accessibility budget or an incomplete accessibility budget. Then we’ll talk about the, what I’m going to call, I’m doing air quotes here for our listening audience, “accessibility essentials” that should receive budget consideration. We’re going to do a breakdown of each essential budget line item, its cost structure, and some basic considerations around those as you’re thinking about projections and thinking about gauging what your need is for that line item. I’ll show you how to run these projections with answers to a few basic questions.

Then you can run the projections based on those answers to get a basic ballpark if you can’t go out and get an actual quote. Then finally, we’ll run through a scenario that I put together that’s basically going to walk through a plausible real world scenario that could exist. Then we will create a mock accessibility budget based on that scenario to try to tie everything together. I think it’s equally important to talk about just very briefly what this presentation is not. I am not here to dictate to you what you absolutely have to budget for in 2025. I am not here to shame you if you can’t budget for some of these things.

I’m also not really going to dig into “compliance” with accessibility laws. This is purely about budgeting. Compliance and WCAG conformance and all of those other considerations are a separate discussion that obviously very much relates to this, but this is purely about budgeting. My hope is that giving you these tools, you can set some very clear financial goalposts for 2025 and make progress on accessibility, because that’s really what’s important.

Why do this presentation? This year, I’ve had a lot of conversations with a lot of people who work at all sorts of organizations. On this slide here, I have an image that shows four wooden figurines, each with a speech bubble above their head. These people that I’ve spoken with are employees or leaders at universities, public sector organizations, nonprofits, massive web agencies with hundreds of employees, and major household name, WordPress plugin companies. I have also spoken with an equally large number of small mom-and-pop businesses, boutique marketing agencies with two or three employees, and solopreneurs working in the digital space.

In fact, totaling all that up and reflecting back on the year so far, which is almost over now, I’ve had about 150 conversations with organizations across all of that spectrum about their accessibility programs at some level. Of that group, I would say about 60% of those said they had no clearly defined budget for accessibility whatsoever. Another 30% had a rough accessibility budget, but there were some obvious gaps after we started to have deeper conversations.

Only about 10% of those I spoke with had what I would describe as a well-defined accessibility budget that covers the scope of what we’re going to talk about today and factors in the business activities, and ties those back to the budget and what needs to be made accessible, what needs to be evaluated, et cetera. Considering these statistics, we are faced with this obvious question. Why do most organizations fail to budget for this effectively? There are really, I think, four key reasons that also represent a progression of where someone is or where an organization kind of is on their accessibility journey from a financial standpoint.

Where most are starting that have no budget is accessibility is this totally new concept to them, and they are gathering information. The next level is they’re aware of accessibility on some level, but there’s no in-house champion that’s building out or trying to start a comprehensive program, so there’s no internal will behind that, but there is some knowledge. The next level is accessibility is being championed in-house but there is a lack of buy-in from leadership. I think I saw someone reference that in the chat. We’re going to dig into that more. Finally, there is enthusiasm about accessibility at all levels of the organization, which sounds ideal and great, but there are budget gaps due to misinformation or a lack of funds.

Either there just isn’t money to support this cause that everybody’s championing fully, or people have been fed misinformation and they don’t know what they don’t know, and so they think they have accessibility covered, but once an actual expert gets in and starts talking to them, they think they’re doing their best, but they actually learned that they could be doing more or that they’ve omitted something, not out of negligence or anything like that, just they haven’t been educated. This is the cold hard truth of the matter, which is an organization’s budget is the purest reflection of its priorities.

On this image, I have what I thought was a really clever photograph of a pair of shoes sitting in a puddle on top of asphalt on an overcast day. You can see the shadow of a person reflected in the puddle on the asphalt underneath the shoes, but there’s no one actually occupying the soles of the shoes. It’s this really interesting, what lies beneath the surface type thing. An organization’s budget is the purest reflection of its priorities. Now, am I saying that means you have to drop 25% of your entire annual budget on accessibility to be doing this?

No, that’s not what I’m saying. It couldn’t be further from the truth. What I am saying though, is that if accessibility is not represented in an organization’s budget, it will never be a priority. It’s really that simple. Let’s go into some accessibility essentials. Depending on what your organization does, you may or may not need some of these and we’ll get more into that later on. I do want to run through these and basically read the slide. We’re going to start from the top. The first is automated testing tools. We’re defining these as software that performs tests to identify accessibility defects with little to no human intervention.

The next one is accessibility auditing. These are all budget line items. Accessibility auditing is human evaluation to identify a more comprehensive list of accessibility defects. Usually that’s against accepted standards like the web content accessibility guidelines. Next is accessibility remediation. This is fixing this accessibility issues identified during an automated test or an audit by altering the source code or content according to expert recommendations. Then we have captioning, transcription, and audio description. These are creating text versions of audio content in the case of captioning and transcription or narrated descriptions of visual elements, aka audio description for video for the purposes of accessibility.

Then we have ASL interpretation, which is translating spoken language into American Sign Language for the deaf and hard of hearing community, typically accompanying a video or maybe an audio recording. Then we have doc and PDF accessibility, which this is ensuring that text-based documents are designed and formatted to be accessible to users with disabilities, including those who use screen readers. Then finally, we have training programs. These are programs that are designed to provide reference materials, resources, and direct hands-on training to staff members to help them understand and implement accessibility best practices in their day-to-day.

These are what I would consider the essentials in a year-one accessibility budget, again, somewhat dependent on the activity of the businesses. We’re going to now break down each one of these individually in much more granular detail. Starting again from the top of this list, automated testing tools. We’re going to consider these a variable cost. For maybe people who aren’t as big into accounting nerd terms as me, if you’re not familiar with the concept of fixed or variable costs, essentially a fixed cost is something whose cost is static or it does not change over the course of a year.

A more typical business example might be something like rent. Whether your business is going gangbusters and has tons of people coming in and out the door, or you’re dead and you have no foot traffic, your rent isn’t really going to change based on your business activities or what’s going on. Whereas a variable cost will change based on the business’s activities to a degree. Some of those variable costs are a little bit more variable or a little bit more elastic. Others are a little more rigid, but there is typically a cost output versus the business input that shifts with business activity.

That’s a very quick fixed versus variable cost definition for you. These automated testing tools, I would call them variable. That is quite a cost range there. We’re going to go more into how to project that and narrow that down, believe me, but there is quite a cost range with automated testing tools for accessibility. Some considerations here are the costs, no matter what, are generally going to scale across one or multiple variables. Those are typically maybe the number of websites or domains, the size of the websites, the frequency of automated tests needed, software that uses an external server for scanning.

Think of this like if you’ve ever heard of Siteimprove or Monsido, or one of these other API-based scanners that will hit your website externally and then provide reports on their platform. Those are typically the most variable in terms of cost because your cost could increase or decrease dramatically based on multiple variables, not just one or two. Generally it scales up fairly rapidly. The other version is software that runs on your own server or your own computer or even just as an extension of your browser. That may still have some variability in terms of cost or some of them are even free.

The cost could still go up or down depending on if you’re paying a per-site licensing fee or if you have to just pay maybe a per-user licensing fee to be able to use the software that is otherwise self-hosted. There is still some variability in cost based on the business activities, but it’s not as extreme as something that is hosted on an external server. I do want to be clear though that I’m not trying to present either of these as an advantage versus disadvantage. I think that they all have their own place and their own use cases. This is more about just helping you understand, if we’re prioritizing less or more variability in cost, what choices might I shift my thinking to essentially.

Next is accessibility auditing. I generally consider this cost to be a fixed cost. We have a cost range here of between $1,000 and $15,000 typically. An accessibility audit should be able to be quoted in advance at a fixed price. Full audits, usually we see them taking place every two to three years, provided other monitoring methods are taking place between the audits. The price of an audit will really depend on the size of the website or the sample size that needs to be audited, which is derived from a site’s perceived functionality and complexity as perceived by the expert that’s putting together the estimate or the scope.

The sample size, in my experience, as someone who quotes many, many dozens of both small and large accessibility projects every single year, will range between 1 and 20 pages, possibly higher for large web applications, and we have seen that. Some vendors won’t estimate based on unique pages as a sample, they’ll actually be more granular and they’ll estimate based off of individual unique components. Both are totally legitimate, it’s just a different way of doing things.

Any reputable accessibility vendor will be able to provide you a fixed price upfront and they’ll be transparent about how they arrived at their estimate, or they should be transparent about how they arrived at the estimate, the areas of the site they’re going to evaluate and what their evaluation methods will be. This is accessibility auditing, fixed cost, $1,000 to $15,000 typically. We’re going to go into more detail on how to estimate these, but this is just to give you a primer.

Next is accessibility remediation. This is another fixed cost. The cost is really dependent on the audit results that you get from our previous slide. We have accessibility auditing, we have to know what the problems are, and I went back a slide there. Then following an audit, we have accessibility remediation, which is typically based on the findings of an audit or some sort of evaluation that was done. A reputable developer should be able to deliver an accurate estimate by reviewing a audit report that has sufficient levels of detail of all the issues, their locations, and the required fixes.

If you carefully consider the vendor’s approach and experience, I think you should be able to tell, does this vendor have experience with my particular website makeup or software stack, or CMS? Does this vendor frequently remediate WordPress websites, or does their website say they do accessibility for Wix? There’s some sort of that basic vetting that you can do. If anything is unclear as you do that vetting, ask questions. Ask them about their experience with some of the particular tools that your website uses. Ask them about their methodologies and how they would go about making the fixes.

Are they doing everything with JavaScript? Are they going to recommend that you switch out your theme? There’s a lot of considerations there, and you want to make sure you have some transparency around what their approach is going to be, at least at a high level. Your in-house team, this is important to anticipate, may end up being involved in the remediation process in a limited capacity, particularly if a lot of the accessibility issues are coming from a site’s content and not its building blocks.

This is logical if you have an in-house team who’s been trained up in the use and maintenance of your website and making basic content changes that you would probably rather have your in-house team, for instance, putting alt text on images or changing the order of headings or making sure that links aren’t ambiguous, versus paying an external vendor, you know, $150, $200 an hour to do that very basic work. That’s not to say it doesn’t make sense all the time, but it’s something that you should try to anticipate is that there may be some involvement from your team for the more basic remediation tasks, which I think is also just a good habit-building thing.

Finally, in terms of estimating accessibility remediation, if you are trying to estimate these costs before you have an audit done, a good rule of thumb is to take what you’ve budgeted for an audit, assuming that that budget range that you’ve assigned is reasonably accurate, and multiply that times about 1.25x to basically get a base remediation cost so that you have something there as a line item if you don’t have an accurate estimate yet.

Obviously, for all of this, it’s good to get an accurate estimate for a professional, but if you’re trying to just put together a reasonable within the realm of reality, accessibility budget, that rule of thumb is one that you can use that will set some clear and reasonable expectations as far as what that might cost. Captioning and transcription. This is another variable cost. The costs can range depending on the level of complexity of what you’re having captioned or transcribed or audio described, as well as if it’s being done live or in post-production, if someone has to be on-site versus off-site.

There’s a lot of considerations. These ranges, I’ll read them out. Captioning is usually, again, with those variables, between $2 and $10 a minute. Transcription is between $1 and $3 a minute typically. And then audio description is between $15 and $30 per minute. The cost of providing text alternatives for media is tied directly to the quantity of media you’re producing and the complexity of that media.

If an organization has this archive of media, which we see frequently in our remediation projects with no text alternatives, say there’s 500 old videos that are sitting on a resource archive somewhere, there will be an upfront cost associated with rolling this out because there is a backlog of media that needs text alternatives produced before or while you’re also producing text alternatives for the media you are producing right now. As a real-world example, Equalize Digital pays $2.50 a minute for captions and $1.25 a minute for transcripts for WordPress Accessibility Meetup, just to give you an idea.

These cost ranges are based on my own research, what I know our customers have paid for this and what our own company has paid for this. This is not some industry study surveying coast-to-coast 500 companies. This is just my own lived experience and what I know the numbers look like from my day-to-day in quoting and managing budgets on projects for not just us, but for the accessibility projects of other companies of all sorts of different sizes. You can take that how you want, but I think that these are reasonable ranges, in my professional opinion.

In terms of ASL interpretation, again, this is a variable cost for similar reasons to what we described before for the text alternatives for multimedia. Depending on how much you’re producing and whether or not you have a backlog of media that didn’t previously have ASL interpretation done, you may have an upfront cost and then there is certainly an ongoing cost if you choose to do this. It’s tied directly to the quantity of media you’re producing and the complexity. If you have an archive of media, there will be the upfront cost.

As a real-world example, when we have ASL sponsorships or sponsorships for a meetup that covers ASL, we pay $150 an hour, so at the top of the range from a local company here in Central Texas to have the ASL interpretation done. Next up, we have doc and PDF accessibility. Another variable cost. The cost breakdown is between $1 and $3 a page for the evaluation to be done. Then between $3 and $15 a page for the remediation to be done. The cost of this is tied directly to how many documents your organization publishes or makes available for public consumption online.

Maybe if you have any sort of backlog of old documents, that would also have to be a consideration similarly with ASL and with captions and transcripts, The per-page fee associated with these really varies based on the volume of pages, the complexity of the content, and the turnaround time, another big one. In order to reduce costs, some organizations will start to convert their docs and PDFs into web pages or blog posts instead. In fact, this is something depending on the content itself that we often advise people to do if they’re concerned about egregious doc and remediation costs or potentially archiving docs that are sitting out there that don’t really serve anyone anymore.

As a real-world example, this year we produced a 40-page e-book with a lot of design accents and unique layouts going on. Between the evaluation and the remediation, it cost us $18.75 per page to evaluate and remediate that e-book just to make sure the work that our in-house designer did was fully going to work for everybody that wanted the e-book, capital E everybody. Finally we have training programs. These are another fixed cost. You can get them quoted in advance. The costs are usually between $1,000 and $10,000. And there are different types of accessibility trainings available.

For the purposes of this presentation, what I’m thinking of when I say accessibility training is something more intensive, like a full day accessibility workshop for your team and not necessarily just a one-hour canned presentation. The cost ranges will vary based on the size of the group, the complexity of the subject matter, and if you’re doing it on site, the trainers’ travel and lodging expenses.

Of course whether or not that workshop had to be basically custom built for your specific training needs, which means there was a lot more prep time upfront versus teaching on a more general accessibility topic like intro to accessibility or accessibility considerations for WordPress or other things like that that are just more general. A reputable trainer, like I said, should be able to give you a fixed cost for the workshop upfront and also provide specifics on what exact knowledge they’re going to impart on your team. Definitely don’t sign up for a training if you don’t know what you’re going to learn.

Which sounds like common sense. Yes, Gary commented about cost for class accessibility and reasonable accommodations. That certainly would be factored into it. That would be, I would think, depending on the training situation, something that the trainer should be bearing in terms of cost and that they should have factored into their fees if they’re the ones facilitating the training virtually. If it’s done in-house, then obviously that’s on the business to make sure that their facilities and all of their equipment are going to provide reasonable accommodation for everyone.

The next question that I think some people ask is, should I bring accessibility in-house for some of this? Because some of this sounds kind of expensive. Or I didn’t think of X, Y, Z. Could I just have one of my team members do it? There’s a series of kind of tests or questions that you have to go through in order to really know the answer to that. First is scope. Does the accessibility work that I want to assign this team member reasonably fall within the scope of their role? The next is effectiveness. Is the team member capable? Do I reasonably think that the team member is capable of delivering a roughly equivalent result?

Then there’s efficiency. Will the team member complete the job at a similar pace or potentially faster? There’s of course the direct cost. Based on how long this team member might be spending doing this and what I know I pay them, will the in-house labor to do the work cost less than what the expert charges? Finally, there’s the opportunity cost of bringing it in-house. Is this the most valuable use of the team member’s time in the context of bringing value back to my company, or is there something maybe that they could be doing that would bring more value and therefore it makes sense to just have an external expert handle it?

It’s important to have clarity around the in-house discussion is really not all or nothing. You could certainly, and we do this at Equalize, fulfill some parts of this yourself and rely on external experts for other parts. For instance, the person captioning this event right now is not an Equalize digital employee. We could maybe ask a team member to try to caption this, but they’re going to be less effective, less efficient, probably more costly, and there’s an opportunity cost there as well. In that sense, it made sense to bring in an expert to do that work.

Whether you want to delegate captioning or you maybe want to assign an in-house team member to take on remediating your website’s content for accessibility and fixing those low-level content issues, these are the questions to ask first. If the answer to most of all or all of the questions that I’ve posed here is yes, it very well may be a good idea to bring some parts of accessibility in-house and delegate them to your team. I’ve heard people say before that bringing accessibility in-house eliminates cost. I want to be very clear that handling accessibility in-house doesn’t make the cost go away.

It just shifts the cost to a different part of your P&L statement. My point here is not really that moving accessibility in-house is a bad idea. In fact, it can fundamentally be a really good and cost-effective decision in the right situation. I want to dispel this notion that bringing accessibility in-house erases accessibility costs. Now we’re going to get into some projections. We’ve run through the definitions, we’ve run through costs and considerations for all these. Now we’re going to talk about, again, moving in that top-to-bottom order from the original list of definitions, how I would go about projecting some of these costs.

First up, we have automated testing tools. There’s really three options in my mind. First are free automated testing tools. That’s using a tool like WAVE or Equalize Digital’s free plugin to run some basic automated tests on your website. That is a $0 line item, other than the time of the individual person on your team who’s using that tool to evaluate and recording or reporting on what is coming back in the findings. Next are what I call self-hosted tools. These are the tools that you either have as installed software on your computer that you’re running yourself or it’s installed on your server in the form of a plugin that doesn’t call any sort of external API or external connection.

those typically have either a flat licensing fee that’s just based on the number of sites. It’s fairly rigid, but still a little bit of variability if you start to add more websites or add domains or things of that nature, or you multiply basically the number of sites that you’re going to install this on by the per site cost. That is how you would go about projecting that. Really the only way you’re going to get an accurate per-site cost, of course, is to go to the pricing page of whatever self-hosted software tool of choice that looks good to you and to find out what they charge for licenses and then write that into your budget.

I can’t really give you a rule of thumb there because they range. I can tell you that for a single site plan of Accessibility Checker, our tool, for instance, for the premium version, it’s $144 a year. You could write that into your budget and multiply that times the number of sites if it’s just one or two, or you could go to larger plans. We don’t need to get into that whole thing, but you get the idea. There should be clear and public pricing information available for many, if not most of these self-hosted accessibility tools. Then there’s external tools. These have a lot more variables.

I’m speaking again from lived experience of having used these kinds of tools before and having worked with organizations that use them. Typically, there is a base cost of the number of domains that are being scanned times a unit cost. Then you add on the number of pages that are going to be scanned times a per-scanned fee. Sometimes you have a few scans bundled or included. Other companies don’t do that. Then there will be an additional multiplier based on the number of scans you’re planning to run throughout the year. You can see this can really stack, especially if you have a lot of pages and you need to run scans really frequently, it can get very expensive.

That’s why you saw in my original slide showing the cost ranges, we were 0 to $50,000. It could even go higher than that. I know organizations that are paying these external tools in excess of six figures every single year. Those tools have advantages. They’re not necessarily ripping anybody off. It’s just it is a way of fulfilling this need that is maybe a little less cost-efficient depending on how the organization is made up, what their web footprint looks like and what their needs are. That is projections on automated testing. Next, we’re going to talk about projecting audits.

The real question to ask here first is how many websites do I need audited? Some organizations have, six, seven, nine different websites that they’re managing. I was speaking to a winery literally the day before yesterday in Central California that has 49 websites for all of their different brands, but they’re 1 company. Maybe your answer to this is I have one website, maybe it’s a much larger number, but you need to know the number of websites you’re auditing. Then you need to ask yourself what the relative complexity of each of those websites are.

Maybe you can set up a basic spreadsheet where you put all the URLs and then you put your assessment of what you think the relative complexity is to get a budget ballpark even before you go to somebody like me and get a comprehensive quote. This is what I think a good guideline is. This is based on what I have heard other organizations tell me. They’ve paid for audits from other providers, and what I know we charge for audits and kind of doing an amalgam of the two. This isn’t our pricing or anything. This is just a law of averages, if that makes sense.

A small website with three to five pages total, you might be looking at $3,000 for an audit. A medium website, 8 to 15 pages roughly, you might be looking at $6,000. Any large websites or e-commerce, it can easily hit five figures. That’s how you can do a baseline estimate and you can tally up your websites, tally all that up and you know, if you wanted to audit everything, what it would roughly cost and you can start to set some financial expectations there. Next, let’s talk about remediation. What is the number and approximate cost of the accessibility audits I will have done?

If I go back, we just established the number of websites we’re auditing and hopefully we’ve put them into these three buckets at the very least. Then I can take that and I can apply that 1.25x rule of thumb that I mentioned earlier for estimating remediation and I can assign some sort of remediation budget to a website. If I am a company with one mid-size moderate complexity website, my base remediation costs after the audit are likely to be about $7,500. Next, running projections on captioning, transcription, and audio description. Again, we’re asking ourselves questions.

We have to kind of think through what our company is going to be doing or what we’re going to be doing as individuals. First question to ask is roughly how many minutes of video or audio content am I going to produce, and do I have a backlog? If I have a backlog, how much is that? What text alternatives will I provide for my videos? Do I aspire to provide that full list that I shared or am I going to start smaller and work my way up? Then essentially, we multiply our number of minutes by an average total per-minute cost. For example, if we are producing eight hours of video in a year with captions and transcripts only, no audio description currently, then we’re paying maybe $4 a minute.

Seems like a fair estimate. The costs are likely to be around $2,000 for the year to caption and transcribe all of that video. Next up, we have ASL interpretation. Similar line of questioning here. Roughly how many hours of video or audio content am I producing in total? Do I have a backlog? How many videos am I producing? What is the average length of the video? This is particularly important for this. There are really two possible calculations here. One is the number of hours times an hourly fee, or the other one is a number of videos you’re producing as a tally times an hourly fee.

I recommend using the second calculation if the ASL interpretation is going to be live and the average video length is going to be less than one hour because in my experience, a lot of ASL interpreting providers have a one-hour minimum. Some even have a two-hour minimum. If you’re doing this live and it’s shorter form content, not around an hour like our meetup is, you might be paying that minimum no matter how long it is. You’ll have to use your best judgment on which calculation to use for this one. Docs and PDFs. Again, we’re going through a similar line of questioning with this, but it’s a little different.

Roughly how many docs will I produce in total? Do I have a backlog? Then best educated guess, what is the average doc length that I produce? With this, it may be a little hard, but I would aim high. Just to make sure you’re covering your bases. Am I planning to do the remediation in-house versus having an external expert fix the problems in the doc? Then finally, are there any docs, as I think about the docs that I’m going to be producing this year, that could reasonably be converted to webpages or blog posts, or just completely archived in the terms of my content backlog.

Instead of remediating, could I archive some content that’s sitting out there that actually isn’t serving any purpose and nobody’s even looking at it. Therefore it would probably be a waste of resources to remediate it. Maybe I just take it off the internet entirely. If someone asks for it, I can provide them an accessible version on that point if they need that. Based on these series of questions, you can arrive at this kind of calculation, which is the number of total docs minus any docs you’re planning to archive or convert times the average number of pages to arrive at total number of pages that you would need evaluated times the average per-page fee.

That per-page fee would either be for auditing or evaluation only, or evaluation plus remediation, depending on if you’re doing the remediation in-house. Next, we have training programs. This is the last one and then we’re going to go through a scenario. How many accessibility workshops would I like my team to attend in this coming year? That’s the first question. Do I expect these workshops to cover more basic or more advanced accessibility topics? That might require a conversation with your team, or if you’re at a larger company, a conversation with the managers of departments to get a feel.

How many people from my company will attend this training or this workshop? Finally, reaching out to two to three vendors to get competing quotes is always what I recommend, but absent that, or if you need to do a quick calculation, I think generally, again, law of averages the number of planned attendees times about $150 captures a reasonable baseline expectation for accessibility training. You will probably have some variance over or under that, depending on your head count. It’s a good place to just have something in the line item so that the money’s allocated so that you can figure something out and not just do nothing.

Let’s put it all together. I’m going to read through a scenario basically that I made up, but it is based on real conversations that I’ve had this year. Here we go. I am running a middle-of-the-road small business with a physical location near downtown in a mid-sized US city. My business does about $500,000 in annual revenue. We have about six employees. According to national averages, that’s about the average. We have a small brochure website and do a fair amount online to try and drive more foot traffic to our business. We produce about one hour of video content every single month to post on social media.

We also update texts and images on parts of our website a couple of times each month. I’d like to add more content to the website if I can, except for PDFs. I hate PDFs. I don’t like creating them or dealing with them, so no docs. The agency I work with isn’t sure if the website is accessible. Neither am I. Next year, I really want to make sure I’m covering all the basics and we can continue to gradually improve from there. Let’s translate that to a budget, which I have done. This business probably would be well-suited since they have just one website and their website has some activity on it, but not a lot, they’re not a huge company, a self-hosted tool, which I just line-itemed as $150 for a one-site license fee.

We know that they have a small, simple brochure website. We’re going to budget $3,000 for an initial audit, and then using that 1.25x budget, we’re going to budget $3,750 for accessibility remediation. We know they produce 12 hours of video a year. So using a basic calculation, we get to $2,880 for video captioning and transcription. They want to start where they can. They want to do better. Maybe they’ll roll out ASL interpretation eventually, but they’re not going to do it right now. That line item for ASL interpretation and audio description for their video is zero currently, but they’re going to reconsider it in year two. Right now, they’re trying to make progress. Docs and PDFs, they don’t really touch them. That’s zero. They have six employees.

Their training program cost, if we use that base $150 calculation, is going to be $900. If we put that in the context of their revenue, that means their year-one costs for accessibility are about 2.1% of their annual $500,000 in revenue. For an organization like that, and understanding what I understand about business and margins and the type of business they are, that might eat into a significant portion of their profit margin, or maybe not. It all depends on the business. What we’re not really accounting for and what I can’t account for in the time that I have here really is the additional benefits that they’re actually going to get from observing these best practices because budgeting for accessibility is not pure cost.

You get real benefits from this in terms of SEO, increased traffic, increased conversions. There’s a litany of others. Again, we can’t really get into detail here, but just one more, adding transcripts to the website and cross-posting captioned video to the website is an easy way to quickly expand content footprint for businesses that produce video. Right there, your captioning and transcription can actually improve your SEO, give more content that’s going to draw people to your website because search engines will scrape that, crawl that, and output it in SERPs.

It’s a great way to expand that reach. What I’ve really gone through today is year-one accessibility considerations. One thing we didn’t really talk about is ongoing user testing and monitoring services for accessibility. These, though you should be aware, should cost substantially less than auditing. Year two, maybe even year three, I would say the rule of thumb would be to take that year-one auditing budget that you have and multiply it by about 0.25 to get what I consider a really solid user testing budget. You might even be able to budget less than that, but I’m going for solid.

This makes sure that your user testing budget in years where you’re not auditing reflects the size and complexity of your website. Bottom line, once you get to year two and out of this year one cycle, your budget should drop a good bit for accessibility, provided nothing major has changed, like you didn’t build an entirely new website or double or triple your video production. Your accessibility budget should go down. In years three or four where maybe you are re-auditing, hopefully remediation costs will be far, far lower because your team will have been trained because we budgeted for training.

Training really does pay for itself. We’ve seen it time and again. I want to finish with this thought, which is that accessibility is not an all-or-nothing thing. Prioritize progress over perfection. Can’t pay for the full accessibility audit? Still do the audit, just lower the scope. You’ll still make progress. Can’t audit five pages? Audit one page. Can’t pay for monthly scans for an offsite scanner because your website is too massive? Switch to a self-hosted scan or keep using the offsite scanner, but scan quarterly instead of monthly. Can’t find the money to do captioning, transcription and audio description and ASL for all your videos?

Start with just captioning the first year. It’s 100% better than doing nothing at all. You can always roll out more later. Here’s my general ask as we wrap this up and as you’re out there budgeting, I want you to try to see out there, if your colleagues, your fellow business owners, your fellow department heads, whoever they are, are putting genuine effort and funds behind accessibility and it’s showing, try to shout them out, try to compliment their efforts while still telling them maybe some ideas of where they could improve. We can all advocate, but we can all also congratulate and compliment one another if we’re putting in genuine effort and we are having our budget reflect our priorities in terms of accessibility. Thank you very much. I am happy to answer as many questions as I can in the time we have.

>> PAOLA: Thank you, Chris. That was a very insightful presentation. I love seeing all the numbers and the quotes and the math in there. That was really good. We did get a few questions coming through while you were presenting, so we can just start going through them. Diane asks, I know “Equalize Digital is very careful to make sure the transcript captions are absolutely accurate for videos. For the average company uploading YouTube videos of say board meetings, YouTube does a pretty good job of providing those. There might be minor mistakes with the spelling of the speaker’s name, but usually the content is correct. How important is it legally to really fix all mistakes on those videos?”

>> CHRIS: I am not going to get into legal stuff. I think that the most important thing to understand is it’s important with any automated solution to validate that it’s actually doing what it says it’s doing. This applies to automated alternative text for images, automated captions, or automated transcripts, or even one we talk about often sometimes, which is accessibility overlays, which have been proven to not do what they say they’re going to do when frequently tested.

I would do your own testing, your own validation, your own discovery, and I would spend a little time if you’re uploading those board meeting videos or whatever video content is, and just take the time every few weeks, or few videos as a starting point, listen to the video carefully, read the captions as the video is going. Note how many mistakes it’s making. Make note of whether those mistakes are immaterial or material to you.

That’s subject to your interpretation. Depending on the organization, it might really matter if the automatic captions misspell someone’s name. To another organization, maybe it doesn’t. You definitely want to make sure that the information that is being conveyed in the text alternative is going to deliver the same experience that your typical audio-visual user is going to get.

>> PAOLA: That’s a great answer. I’ll pitch in a bit. As a content creator, I would say automated tools when it comes to AI generation, I feel like they are a start when it comes to accessibility content, anything related to that. It’s always good, as you mentioned, just to go through and see what it missed, what it does right, and see how it fits into your business.

>> CHRIS: I’ll also mention, and I believe we either just released this episode or it’s coming in our pipeline on the podcast side, but Amber, Steve, and I had an entire conversation about text alternatives for multimedia and the specific WCAG criteria, but also our own experiences dealing with that. I personally on the podcast, do our captioning and our transcription, because it makes more sense since I’m already in there editing the content to just go ahead and do that. We talked about the questions that we asked. Should we bring this in-house in that instance?

The answers were all yes, because we were already in there making the effort, so it made sense for me to do it. In my own experience, there’s a lot on that podcast episode that I share that I think you might find really interesting in terms of the types of mistakes that these automated solutions typically make, and how they really could matter depending on the type of content you’re putting out.

>> PAOLA: Adding to that, that episode is live on accessibilitycraft.com. Going to the next question, Emmy says, “Are there budgets templates that you can share for accessibility specifically?”

>> CHRIS: Budget templates for accessibility. I haven’t produced one for this presentation, but I could see that being really useful and that is a really good idea. I will probably assign myself a to-do to put something like that together, maybe for our agency partners.

>> PAOLA: That’s a great topic suggestion. Vanessa asks, “In light of the recent ADA update requiring both websites and apps to be accessible, how are you incorporating app testing and remediation into your company’s budget and overall accessibility strategy?

>> CHRIS: We ourselves don’t have a application that we manage. If we’re talking about a traditional mobile app or something that would be on one of these, I’m holding up my phone. I do think that you absolutely need to budget for that if your company is putting out any sort of application that ties into your website or ties into what you’re delivering. There are plenty of accessibility professionals out there that I am sure would love to test your application, provide feedback.

There is an equal or greater number of application developers for mobile and for desktop that would love to make whatever application your company is building more accessible. We’re more of a web-focused firm, but we can test things on mobile, and we do frequently. That’s about the best answer I can give for that. Hopefully it semi-addresses your question.

>> PAOLA: That is a good answer. I’m going to the next question. Gary asks, “Have you ever developed any budgets for federal agencies or state and local agencies? Similar results or very different?”

>> CHRIS: I have never been responsible for developing a comprehensive accessibility budget from scratch for any federal or state agency. I’m guessing there would probably be regulations preventing them for leaning on me for that completely. What I have done is plenty of providing estimates and helping them map out what those costs might be that they then take and massage internally and discuss internally. I’m sure I have had a hand in people’s budget writing very frequently because I am one of the first stops when someone needs an estimate, but I have not formally written a budget for anybody outside of Equalize Digital ever.

>> PAOLA: That makes sense. Amina asks, “What are your thoughts on using or developing a risk management matrix against digital assets for building a budget?” That’s a very complex question. Very loaded.

>> CHRIS: I’m not a CRO or a chief risk officer. I would have to do some brushing up on what a risk management matrix is to really understand the implications of that question. I’m sorry that I don’t know exactly what that looks like. However, if I can answer at a higher level, I think that one thing to pay very close attention to on a risk management standpoint is where the most eyeballs are on the content you’re putting out there digitally and prioritizing that first in terms of auditing remediation and making sure that it’s accessible if one of your primary motivators is just managing risk around accessibility complaints or lawsuits or violations, which I understand is a major motivator for a lot of firms.

I think that paying attention to things like Google Analytics, traffic patterns, analytics on social media platforms or YouTube or others, see where the engagement is and prioritize that first, and try to have that reflected in your budget, if that makes sense.

>> PAOLA: We also have another question that says, “Do you have any suggestions for recordings, especially meeting recordings?”

>> CHRIS: I can speak to my own experience. I know there are a lot of options out there. What I am most accustomed to using and that I think does a reasonable job at speeding along the process if the end objective is to produce accurate captions and transcripts that convey the same experience that a typical user would get, then I would recommend checking out Descript, D-E-S-C-R-I-P-T. It is a desktop application. There may be a web app interface for it too. Basically you can drag your media into it, whether it’s audio or visual media. It will, excuse me, auto-transcribe or auto-caption it with timestamps.

It’s also a fully featured editing system where you can slice and dice and adjust audio quality. You then have the ability to essentially go through and review the transcripts and correct them with a pretty sophisticated set of tools before finally publishing the content. It’s something that we use internally that I think does a really good job at speeding things up, especially compared to if I’m going to be writing those from scratch, which it would take me way longer if I was doing that. If it’s something that you need to do in-house, you might look at something like Descript. You might also look at and speak to some captioning and transcription providers, because honestly, depending on the nature of the meetings you’re holding, how often you’re holding them, what the content is, how many speakers there are, you may be able to get a really affordable rate that isn’t really a big burden on your budget to just have a professional help you with this and don’t feel like you have to do it in-house.

>> PAOLA: Yes. Then Paul says, will there be another webinar outlining the benefits to the clients of using Accessibility? I know you touched on it, but sometimes more in-depth would be beneficial with selling Accessibility to clients who do see it solely as a cost.

>> CHRIS: I actually did a three-part webinar series with Quickly Hire/GoWP earlier in the year, all about positioning and selling Accessibility offers for agencies. If you’re interested in that, you can send an email to our meetup email address or to me directly, chris@equalizedigital.com, and I can get you the links for those so that you can check that out, that goes into a lot of detail.

The other thing that I have done, if you don’t feel like sitting through three hours of sales presentations, which I know not everybody does, I did a follow-up on that that is a more condensed version that gets really just to all the golden nuggets, at least what I consider the golden nuggets, in partnership with Bluehost and Kelly Dills, a little bit earlier this year. That one, I can also probably link to a recording, I think Bluehost has a recording somewhere. If you want either one of those, reach out to me, I can get you a link.

I feel like, Paola, don’t we have some older meetup presentations that talk about this a bit more? I know there’s a selling Accessibility or a selling clients on Accessibility one that Ryan Bracey did that I thought was particularly fantastic because it was all about educating customers on the actual importance and human impact of Accessibility and not just the business metrics side of it, like increasing SEO and convergence and the other things we talk about.

That Accessibility presentation, which would be in our meetup archive on our website, Ryan Bracey, I think was the presenter, would be another particularly good one to look at if you’re looking at some guidance on how to talk to clients about Accessibility, or honestly, even for those of you that are the internal Accessibility champion who’s trying to get leadership buy-in, that would probably be a really good meetup to reference as well if you’re looking for some sales tactics.

>> PAOLA: Yes. I just posted the link to that meetup talk in the chat. John asks the quantity I’m facing as a small agency is your estimated cost for auditing and remediation of a “small” website can easily exceed what they paid for the website. Another challenge becomes convincing them to invest that amount without any guarantee of being fully compliant with WCAG.

>> CHRIS: Yes, it is a challenge that I fully recognize. That’s one where I go back to trying to get out of the cycle or help your customer get out of the cycle of all-or-nothing thinking around Accessibility. Just because you cannot do the full audit and the full remediation doesn’t mean that you can make progress. If we’re concerned again about lowering our exposure to risk and reducing our Accessibility backlog, for lack of a better word, then you can certainly value that idea of progress over perfection.

If you can’t audit a full brochure website, audit the homepage and the header and footer, because that’s probably what 90% of your traffic is hitting. If you make sure that that’s accessible, that gives a solid first impression, and then you can back that up with an automated testing tool that can help you correct a lot of fundamental Accessibility issues that may just be in your content and not even in your theme or in your plugins.

Is that a perfect approach? Is it the ideal approach that someone who works in Accessibility day-to-day like myself would say, “Yes, you’re doing a perfect job?” No, probably not but I also understand the realities of business. I think that if businesses can start to just do something versus just throwing their hands up and saying, “Oh, it’s too expensive.” I’m not saying this about you personally, I hope you understand that. It’s more just trying to just do what you can, move a step forward, two steps forward, every quarter, every six months, every year, whatever pace you can manage that allows your business to continue to grow and exist while observing these best practices.

There’s also the consideration of the benefits again. There are very real benefits to Accessibility. We outlined in some previous answers, some things you can look at and talk through with your customers about some of the benefits that they might see with that, probably more than I can go into here. I hope that gives you something to think about at least. Again, that’s not anything personally directed at you, it’s just something to catalyze this idea of, “Okay, I can’t do everything, but what can I do?”

>> PAOLA: Yes, and adding a bit into that, there is the WebAIM Million Report. It’s the report that they run every year where they report on a million homepages. It’s very interesting to go into this report because they go into the top Accessibility issues in those websites. Most of them can be easily solved with content. Now, an automated tool can help you audit this and find them, and then you would have to go in and rectify them, rectify the errors and the mistakes and the Accessibility issues. That’s a great also start point when it comes to WCAG compliance. Now going into the next question, Sharon says, how dependable, robust are the currently available free resources that scan websites?

>> CHRIS: I mean one of the ones that I think I mentioned, WAVE, we use internally all the time for quick checks for front-end Accessibility. That’s the [unintelligible 01:05:46] Accessibility. Paola just linked to it. I think not all free tools are created equal, but I like to think that WAVE is an excellent one. A lot of Accessibility professionals use it. Like any free tool, it has its limitations.

Then I would also like to think that our tool, Accessibility Checker, is a fairly full-featured free Accessibility testing tool for WordPress that if you have a simple WordPress site, you probably never need to go to a paid version.

>> PAOLA: Then we also have another question. Thank you so much for this presentation, are there data-informed resources about return on investment, ROI, of budgeting for Accessibility? I believe but need more data to make my case.

>> CHRIS: Sure, I totally appreciate that. I know that we have one smaller case study that Amber did in partnership with Highland Community College earlier in the summer this year. They partnered with us. They were under review by the Office of Civil Rights, and we got them out from under that review in about six or seven months by auditing and remediating their website for Accessibility. Amber did do some digging into Google Analytics and conversions and saw some pretty interesting increases in overall traffic and conversions and outreach to that school for enrollment and things of that nature.

If you check our blog, or maybe Paola can find a, oh, Paola already found it, so that case study would be a good one to look at. That’s the thing that immediately comes to mind. There may be more that we could dig into, but that’s the one I have most closely at hand.

>> PAOLA: Then Jonathan asks, where does VPAT/ACR generation come in the budget process? Any special formula to calculate that?

>> CHRIS: Yes, that’s a good question. I didn’t really factor in VPATs and ACRs just because those typically are needs of larger organizations that are fundamentally more likely to have real established Accessibility budgets, because usually, and this isn’t a universal truth, but the larger an organization is, the more likely they are to already have that covered. I would say that if you reach out, like if you reached out to us and you asked for a VPAT preparation, usually that is a flat addition on top of the audit for the time just to prepare that report, because you basically, you have the Accessibility audit that gives you all the data that you need in order to be able to complete a VPAT or an ACR.

There’s an additional consideration there on if you’re going to try to make some fixes that we then have to go back and retest before the VPAT is finalized. That’s another thing that a lot of organizations will want to do so they have a better report to hand off to people, but long story short, it should be a flat fee on top of it. For us, on top of the audit, usually the VPAT addition is between 1 and $2,000 because it takes a couple of days to fully fill that out and validate everything off of an audit.

>> PAOLA: Then Rochelle asks, for small business clients say $150,000 per year or less, which is a lot of my clients, the audit cost is going to be a deal breaker.

>> CHRIS: Sure.

>> PAOLA: How essential is that step?

>> CHRIS: If you are using only an automated testing tool, which is pretty much what you would be limiting yourself to if you didn’t go forward with any sort of audit, you’re probably going to realistically have, depending on the tool, between 30 and 40% coverage of WCAG, kind of at best. Again, if we go back to this idea of all-or-nothing thinking, what you don’t measure, you don’t manage, and 30 to 40% is better than 0%. Start where you can, even if it’s a free tool, and encourage, or advocate, or build in a small service package to go in and fix some of these content-related Accessibility issues to try to improve things how you can.

There are also extensions or things out there for a particular WordPress tools or page builders that try to automatically enhance their Accessibility by fixing Accessibility issues that are in those tools. A common one is Divi has a pretty poor reputation, for instance, for being not very accessible out of the box, but there are extensions that you can install for your Divi websites that dramatically improve and fix some of those fundamental Accessibility shortcomings in Divi source code so that you don’t have to do that yourself. That’s just a matter of installing that extension, doing some quick tests on a staging site to make sure nothing breaks, and then rolling that out to your production environment.

>> PAOLA: We have, as a follow-up to my previous question, I really like your philosophy of progress over perfection you just talked about, but a recent DOJ ruling gives my clients 2.5 years to become fully WCAG compliant. Organizations affected by this ruling see a hard deadline approaching. Any further thoughts on dealing with that?

>> CHRIS: Yes, if laws and regulators are imposing a strict deadline on you, great case is the EU Accessibility Act on that side of the ocean as well. Any websites selling any goods or any sort of bookings, tickets, what have you, directly to EU consumers that has more than $2 million in turnover or more than 10 employees, either or, has to meet WCAG by June 2025, according to their new law. It’s up to the individual EU countries to enforce that legally.

Then in the US, yes, we have the US DOJ expansion of ADA Title II that’s going down to the local and district level that’s saying, “Hey, depending on the number of population you serve, you have between two and three years to be compliant.” In that instance, it’s the law. I do value progress over perfection, and I don’t think that regulations existing invalidates the progress over perfection conversation, right? If you know that there is a legal deadline for you coming up, then you have to make progress.

It doesn’t make sense to wait if you can’t afford to do everything, particularly if there are regulators and enforcers that are going to be jumping on top of you potentially in a relatively short timeframe. It’s something where even if you can’t budget for the comprehensive solution, you have to budget what you can because at the end of the day, if you are faced with lawsuits or with regulatory action, or with a funding source threatening to take funding away in the case of district level interacting with our federal government here in the US because you’re not meeting these requirements.

It’s going to be a lot easier time for you if you can show, “Hey, I’ve been trying, hey, I’ve been putting budget toward this. I’ve been making progress. Here’s how I’m measuring. Here’s what I’ve done so far. Here’s what I know I still need to do. This is the timeline I’m looking at.” I think that being able to show that you’re putting in real genuine effort and resources behind this, even if it’s less than you, again, I’m doing the air quotes, should be putting in, that is still a better conversation than not necessarily doing anything.

>> PAOLA: I’d like to read two of our comments in the chat to add on to that answer. Stephen said, I’ve had some luck selling the audit and remediation together and the same person, who is me, is working on both simultaneously, that gives me the opportunity to find sometimes saving steps to get the most out of their budget. Then Isla also says, the real value of an audit, in my opinion, is the manual testing aspect. If you cannot swing an audit in the budget, start looking for people who use screen readers and pay them ad hoc to review your websites. It will cost much less, you will learn so much and find things to fix. I think those are great-

>> CHRIS: Great points.

>> PAOLA: -add-ons to the answer there. I think this is our last question. FJ Nelson says we don’t like overlays, but how do you approach website owners who insist that an overlay covers them? Are there ways to test overlays for Accessibility?

>> CHRIS: If you’re part of this group and attend our meetups regularly, you’ve probably already seen the overlay fact sheet, but I think that’s a really good place to start. It puts, in a much more concise and effective way, the shortcomings of overlays. Also, Joe Dolson, who runs the WordPress Accessibility team for WordPress Core, put out a absolutely fantastic, relatively short, but fantastic article that talks about another fundamental shortcoming of overlays, where he poses the question, “If overlays are so great, why are they targeting websites as their target customer and not individual users?”

The obvious answer there is that overlays are a product for website owners to feel like they are covering their bases in protecting themselves. That it is not a product that’s actually designed to serve individuals with disabilities genuinely and meeting them at the point of what their needs are. It is a tool designed to be sold to businesses for business reasons, if that makes sense. I thought that was a brilliant combination.

Even beyond that, I frequently point people to the fact that, yes, Lainey Feingold is excellent. Thank you, Gary, for mentioning her. Also, I feel like the statistics that get put out around Accessibility lawsuits by, oh, I always confuse UsableNet and UserWay. I don’t remember which one it is, I’m so sorry, but there is a, maybe Paola can find the link or we can drop it in the notes, but there is a, it starts with a U, but there’s an organization that puts out statistics around lawsuits.

One of the things that I find most fascinating about the 4,500 plus lawsuits that got filed this year is that around 20% of those lawsuits, thank you, Paola, for clarifying my love there, it is UsableNet, not UserWay, thank you. Anyway, 20% of the lawsuits that were filed this year that they’re tracking were filed against people or organizations that had overlays on their website. Also, accessiBe, which is one of the largest overlay providers globally, is currently subject to a class action lawsuit in New York for breach of contract and failure to do what they said they’re going to do for their customers.

I think that there’s a lot of evidence and ammunition out there if you can pull a few things together and know where to look, which hopefully we’ve given you some good starting places there. Thank you, Paola, for the quick work.

>> PAOLA: This may take us into a segue, but John asks, how in the world would the enforcement division confirm WCAG compliance? Is there any tool they could use to verify or certify compliance?

>> CHRIS: Well, I think that it is largely like the enforcement mechanisms that I’m seeing in the US and abroad have largely been outsourced to the judicial branches or just the general population. It’s relying on people to make complaints or to lawyer up and partner with law firms and file lawsuits, but there are other mechanisms for filing complaints. I know that there’s a, in Canada, I think in Ontario, there’s a place you can go to to file a complaint related to the AODA if you find a website that isn’t meeting it.

I know here in the US with the Office of Civil Rights and all of that, there are places where you can file complaints through with them against entities that receive federal funding, and particularly in higher education. There are mechanisms to file complaints, but a lot of it is this crowdsource thing. They’re not hiring, at least to my knowledge, this could change, but they’re not hiring armies of regulators to go out there.

I also don’t think they have to, because I think that when you consider that one in five people, statistically speaking, have some form of disability, your website’s very likely already serving these people or not serving them. They’re increasingly getting more and more ways to compel you to do what you arguably should be doing to begin with. I don’t mean that to sound preachy, I’m just saying what I believe the truth is.

>> PAOLA: I feel like that answer would be a great closing thought to this meetup. Again, thank you, Chris, for all the information, all the numbers, and all your very thoughtful answers. Again, we posted a bunch of resources in the chat and all of those would be on the meetup recap. Thank you so much, everyone, for attending. Chris, any last thoughts that you would like to say before we wrap up the meetup?

>> CHRIS: No, just thank you, everybody, for being here. I appreciate your attention and the lovely questions and all the help that I got in the chat, making additional points and sharing links. That’s always super helpful because I don’t always remember the websites or even names of companies. Thank you all very much for your time today.

>> PAOLA: Yes, thank you, everyone. We’re going to be staying for a few seconds just to make sure that the captions catch up and we’ll see you on the next meetup on Monday, 16th, with Amber for Planning Accessibility. That’s going to be at 7:00 PM US Central. Thank you, everyone.

>> CHRIS: Yes, thank you. I guess I will say as we close out here that that session is intending to build on this one, so if you like this one, definitely go to that one. That’s all we got.

View “How to Accurately Budget for Accessibility” Google Slides.