FAQ

The W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) issued the WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines). Thereafter, several governments adopted these guidelines into their legislations. Section 508 refers to public companies and government agencies, and directly references the WCAG as the accepted standard in the industry. ADA Title III is relevant for the private sector and refers to accessibility of public spaces. In 2018, the DOJ ruled that websites constitute public accommodations and are required to be equally accessible to people with disabilities. As a result, rulings have consistently cited the WCAG as the accepted standard in the industry. Therefore, if you abide by the WCAG you’re as compliant as possible.

The ADA, the Rehabilitation Act and other laws exist in the United States to protect the rights of people with disabilities. While there has been debate in recent years as to specific statutes and whether they can be applied to websites, this was all clarified as of 2018 by the Department of Justice (DOJ).While Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act states that websites must be accessible according to the WCAG, it only applies to government agencies and the large public corporations that work with them.

The WCAG, or Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, are developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and are the only internationally recognized set of guidelines for web accessibility.

The ADA, however, did not say anything at all about websites, and so people began filing suits related to web accessibility because it was clearly in the spirit of the law, but not the text, that websites should be accessible.

After thousands of these suits had been filed, the DOJ had to make a ruling on the issue. The DOJ stated then that all business websites are considered “places of public accommodations” and therefore must be made accessible to people with disabilities. It’s no different in principle from handicapped parking spaces and restrooms.

While the ADA still doesn’t have WCAG guidelines written into the text explicitly, every US court ruling on this issue, and every plaintiff bringing web accessibility complaints, ask for remediation based on the WCAG.

Outside the United States, there are laws ranging from AODA in Canada to EN 301549 in the EU that stipulate WCAG compliance in order to provide web accessibility.

WCAG compliance at the AA level or higher is the best way to ensure that all people regardless of disability can use your website.

ADA – The Americans with Disabilities Act became law in 1990 and protects people with disabilities against discrimination. Title III of the ADA refers to accessibility of public accommodations such as stores, restaurants, Hotels, etc.. Section 508 is part of the Rehabilitation Act and was passed in 1998. It requires federal agencies to develop, procure, and use information and communications technology that is accessible to people with disabilities. W3C is the World Wide Web Consortium that developed the WCAG.

WCAG 1.0 2.0 2.1 – The web content accessibility guidelines were initially released in 1999, but it wasn’t until 2018 that the DOJ regarded websites as public accommodations. This, in turn, expedited the process of governments adopting the WCAG as the standard to make websites accessible. There are 3 levels of accessibility stated in the WCAG – A, AA, AAA The WCAG 2.1 considers AA as the standard of an accessible website.

This can take up to 48 hours; you’ll see the interface immediately after installation and that solves about 30% of the requirements, but you won’t be fully compliant until up to 48 hours later when you also receive your statement of accessibility that doubles as a certificate of performance. You’ll receive that statement directly to your registered email at the moment you become compliant.

Our technology scans your entire website for problems and remediates them on the spot. We provide each website using accessio with a Statement of Accessibility that doubles as a certificate of performance and describes all the adjustment made to the site. We also use accessio ACE, our Automated Compliance Expert, to perform a full scan and 15-page downloadable pdf report.

In the vast majority of cases, Accessio functions perfectly from the moment of installation. In far less than 1% of cases, coding errors on a site’s source could cause the AI engines to misidentify or not identify various elements, which could lead to accessibility holes. As Accessio has no ability to change a site’s source code, it would not be able to correct for this error. That error would, however pop up on an aCe scan, which would inform the site owner of the relevant issue.

In the United States, anyone can be sued for any reason. We cannot prevent someone from suing you, nor can we indemnify you. We do have an intricate process through which we protect thousands of clients from litigation. Would you like me to explain it? Once you have installed accessio, your site will display an accessibility icon, which heads off 90%+ of lawsuits at the pass. If and when someone does approach you with a lawsuit or demand letter, our Accessibility Statement explains the changes that have been made to ensure your site is accessible. This statement can be sent to any legal entity or anyone else who needs clarification on the accessibility level of your site. Finally, in the rare instance that a legal entity has a specific complaint about your site, we have an effective process to handle these, called the Litigation Support Package.

If an Accessio licensee receives a demand letter and contacts us for assistance, we go through the following process. First, we perform a compliance audit along with two scans: aCe and WAVE. We use two scans because aCe is our own, so a third-party scanner concurring with our results is an added assurance. We will then provide our Accessibility Statement, along with our Suggested Response (a form letter we have used to great effect). We will include with this your Purchase Invoice, a Compliance Overview (to explain to the other party how our tool functions and so on), and a Failures Request Master. The Failures Request Master is a spreadsheet in which a complainant can log and document specific perceived accessibility failures or holes and request review of them. In the vast majority of cases, our licensees do not even receive a response to the Suggested Response.

If an Accessio licensee receives a demand letter and contacts us for assistance, we go through the following process. First, we perform a compliance audit along with two scans: aCe and WAVE. We use two scans because aCe is our own, so a third-party scanner concurring with our results is an added assurance. We will then provide our Accessibility Statement, along with our Suggested Response (a form letter we have used to great effect). We will include with this your Purchase Invoice, a Compliance Overview (to explain to the other party how our tool functions and so on), and a Failures Request Master. The Failures Request Master is a spreadsheet in which a complainant can log and document specific perceived accessibility failures or holes and request review of them. In the vast majority of cases, our licensees do not even receive a response to the Suggested Response.

We are constantly reviewing the latest updates in regards to web accessibility and implementing them to ensure our clients remain compliant. In addition, our AI rescans each website every 24 hours to keep current with any updates to the site!

There are many. A few of the big advantages are: analysis and re-remediation every 24 hours so you always stay compliant, no manual work from the customer side, no need to compromise the site UI or design, websites can be made fully accessible in 48 hours, we provide you with a certification of performance, and of course pricing is significantly more reasonable.

Yes, Accessio can function on any domain capable of accepting Javascript code.

Yes, Accessio works on the session therefore it can work on anything the user has access to. We have what is called a “lazy process” that is deployed after the user enters the password-protected section.

No, Accessio is a session-based tool that adjusts the website on the fly after it’s been fully loaded and rendered. There will be no difference in browsing experience for someone who has not activated any accessibility features.

No, there’s just a single line of JS code that needs to be implemented in the body of the site, that’s all.

Accessio functions with no problems on all modern browsers. You can feel free to use Safari, Firefox, Chrome or any other browser you’d like.

No, we use local storage that is on the user side, not the server side, which enables us to function without affecting GDPR or storing any user data.

Local storage is the storage of data on a user’s browser, so as not to transmit personal data.

No, absolutely not! Our AI technology is not only able to identify characters and words, but also to understand context and recognize images, so it’s capable of taking care of all these labels and tags automatically

That’s great! If you’ve already made changes to make your site more accessible, such as adding ALT tags, our AI will not override your work, as we assume you’ve made those changes for a good reason.

We have our own scanner, called ACE (the Automated Compliance Expert) which provides 15-page PDF accessibility reports with relevant code snippets showing accessible and inaccessible elements.

While you can of course check sites manually, we have developed a state-of-the-art Automated Compliance Expert, Accessio ACE, to check everything in seconds.

To request an updated scan, simply contact us.

We take data security very seriously, our infrastructure is in San Francisco and managed by Digital Ocean, we have an entire DevOps team dedicated to this issue. On a regular basis, they make attempts to hack the system and otherwise test it in order to ensure the highest level of ongoing security.

We do not collect any data that would affect your GDPR compliance.

Because i-frames are not actually code belonging to the domain that Accessio is installed on, Accessio cannot affect them. That being said, it is our understanding that it is the responsibility of the owner of the original content the i-frame draws from to make it compliant. If you have content that is i-framed out on other domains, and Accessio is installed in your code, your i-frame will be accessible.

Many of our clients have development and production environments and need to test Accessio before installing it on their main site. We understand this and have enabled subdomains to be added as trials for this purpose. Simply add the subdomain you’d like to test on as a trial like you would any other site, and don’t purchase a full plan. The subdomain has to be online and it must be related to the paid domain. If you need longer than 7 days to test for some reason, contact us and we’ll do whatever we can to help.

With all plans you get the same quality and are fully compliant. The only difference between plans is the number of pages on your site.

Simply go to Google.com and type “site:yourdomain” in the search box. For example, site:espn.com

Or contact us and we’ll let you know.

We consider every UNIQUE URL as a page. If your page has URL parameters, we consider all variations as one page. For example, //domain.com/about is considered a unique URL. If it has parameter variants like ?param=value, this still counts as one page.

Google indexes old pages sometimes, so if you can provide any sort of documentation or verification that your site is below the threshold we would be happy to take that into consideration.

We license every domain and subdomain separately. You can have several subdomains under one account, but you need a separate subscription per subdomain. If you have 10 or more subdomains, contact your partnerships manager to understand how best to handle this.

There is one exception to our solution. Accessio remediates everything in your codebase, but there are certain elements that aren’t included in the code, like PDFs, videos, and documents (word, excel, ppt) so Accessio can’t reach them. Nevertheless, if you have such elements on your site we do offer manual remediation for them, just like other manual services.

There are several key differences between AudioEye’s service and ours. First, AudioEye doesn’t currently offer fully automated service, part of their remediation is manually performed. In addition, their pricing is based on page views, whereas ours is based on indexed pages. This can make a big difference, particularly considering the difference in price itself. AudioEye does claim to provide the same level of compliance that we do, but they do not claim to do so in the same time frame.

Equalweb has a free tool, similar to UserWay, that makes visual changes for some disabilities. That sort of thing generally provides around 20% of the needed compliance. They also provide full-on accessibility consultation and remediation, which involves human developers working on your website and auditing your code. This necessarily costs time and money. Accessio is entirely automated and provides all the compliance needed from the get-go.

User1st helps businesses and website owners make their sites accessible through auditing and manual remediation. They do not, to our knowlege, offer any kind of AI tool, but they do have accessibility experts who can advise businesses, provide training programs, and even perform manual remediation, at a cost reflecting the time and effort needed for all of this. Accessio remediates everything immediately and automatically, for a fee less than a tenth of what a business like User1st might charge.

UserWay offers a free overlay for websites that provides around 20% of the needed compliance according to the WCAG. It simply does not address elements like Alt texts or ARIA labels or assistive technology compatibility. That being said, they do offer audits (at $200 per page, so if your website is 100 pages, $20,000), which can help you make the adjustments needed manually. Accessio’s tool addresses everything UserWay’s does, as well as making all the other needed adjustments on the fly using AI.

A screen reader is a device or piece of software used by people with severe visual impairments or blindness to interact with a computer. Because screen reader users cannot effectively see, the screen reader is designed to “read out” the contents of a website so that they can use it. Some screen readers are physical devices that display the content of a website as braille text, while others are only software and verbally communicate content to the user. Screen readers generally need to be active from the moment the user has activated their computer, because they simply would not be able to operate the computer with a mouse for obvious reasons. While the vast majority of screen reader users are those with either no vision or impaired vision, screen readers are also important for the illiterate and people with certain learning and cognitive disabilities. An example of this would be someone with severe dyslexia who has trouble reading.

When a user enters an Accessio website through their mobile phone with assistive technologies (VoiceOver, TalkBack, etc) enabled, they will receive an announcement letting them know that screen reader adjustments are available. Then, they use right swipe and left swipe just like keyboard users use Tab and Shift+Tab. Likewise, they double-tap as an equivalent to the Enter key.

Just like having a screen reader for a website, a blind person uses assistive technology on their phone at all times. In order to listen to an announcement of a highlighted feature, the user taps one time. To activate that feature the user taps twice. When navigating through a website using a keyboard, the user will use TAB to move forward and Shift + TAB to move backwards throughout the page. For a touchscreen device a user will swipe right to navigate forwards and swipe left to navigate backwards. When using a website that has Accessio, you immediately get an announcement to the assistive technology software stating that this website has accessibility adjustments. The user will swipe right and then tap twice in order to activate the screen reader adjustments.

An “alt” attribute is text meant to be displayed in place of media, usually an image. The text is meant to explain or describe the image in the case that it cannot be properly rendered, or in the case of people using screen readers. Without “alt” attributes, images would not have any text describing them and people might just be told by a screen reader that they are navigating past an image, with no description. This is of course not acceptable, and part of why “alt” attributes are so important.

ARIA labels are important for accessibility purposes because they label otherwise anonymous html elements. For instance, most people would think there’s no need to label a Facebook or Instagram link/icon because the shape is universally recognizable. That may be true for people who can see. For those who cannot, ARIA labels are needed to describe these icons and elements via a screen reader.

The shortcuts on Apple are exactly the same, just replace ALT with Opt. (The Option Button)