How To Track ADA Website Compliance
Making your website ADA compliant requires attention to detail and a systematic tracking of accessibility issues, fixes, and validation through a structured remediation process.
With an audit-based accessibility tracking platform, you can turn your audit report Excel spreadsheet into an online hub that tracks every issue as you work towards full WCAG 2.1 AA or 2.2 AA conformance.
Understanding ADA Compliance Requirements
The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) doesn’t specify exact website requirements, but plaintiffs’ lawyers file thousands of lawsuits annually based on the interpretation that websites are places of public accommodation under Title III.
Because WCAG 2.1 AA has become the most technical referenced standard for website accessibility (and will soon be the legal standard under Title II), WCAG 2.1 AA conformance has become a best practice for Title III ADA compliance.
WCAG 2.1 AA contains 50 success criteria or requirements for web accessibility.
Your website meets some of these success criteria already, but you need an accessibility audit report to know which criteria you don’t meet and which accessibility issues you need to fix.
An accessibility audit is a technical evaluation of your website (or other digital asset) where your website is graded against WCAG.
Setting Up Your Compliance Tracking System
With a technical standard tied to ADA compliance, we can effectively set up a compliance tracking system once we have the audit report.
Even though meaningful access is actually the legal standard, we can use WCAG 2.1 AA as our objective to go above and beyond and follow best practices for compliance (and avoiding website accessibility lawsuits).
To start tracking compliance, uploading your accessibility audit report to an audit-based platform like Accessibility Tracker. The platform will extract every issue, recommendation, and technical detail from your spreadsheet automatically. This creates your baseline for tracking compliance progress.
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The dashboard immediately shows:
- Total accessibility issues identified
- Associated WCAG success criterion for each issue
- Risk scores for each issue based on lawsuit frequency
- Current fix status across all issues
Tracking Issues Through Remediation
Each accessibility issue needs clear status tracking. Accessibility Tracker provides seven status labels to update each issue:
- Not Started: Issue identified but work hasn’t begun
- In Progress: Active remediation underway
- Completed: Fix implemented by your team
- Validated: Fix confirmed by accessibility auditor
- Needs Work: Additional changes required after validation attempt
- On Hold: Work paused due to dependencies
- Discarded: Issue determined not applicable
As your team works through issues, the platform calculates real-time compliance percentages. Unlike scan-based tools that show only automated scan progress, these metrics reflect actual progress toward full WCAG conformance.
Prioritizing Highest Risk Issues
What’s nice about tracking compliance is you can also prioritize issues using the Risk Factor formula. This formula is data-driven with the issues that are claimed most often in complaints filed in court scored the highest.
Sorting by risk factor ensures you’re addressing the issues that have the highest associated risk first.
Key Insights
- An audit-based platform making tracking ADA compliance much easier and much more precise
- Status tracking through remediation stages provides clear visibility into compliance progress
- Risk-based prioritization enables your team to reduce risk as you fix issues
- Validation tracking ensures that fixes were not only made but made correctly
FAQ
How does audit-based tracking differ from automated scanning?
Automated scans only flag about 25% of accessibility issues so we don’t want to track progress on scan results. Tracking based on audits means we’re tracking for full WCAG conformance (so long as we received a quality audit report).
Can multiple team members fix issues simultaneously?
Yes, assign issues to different team members and they can all chip away at the issues at the same time.
What happens after all issues are validated?
If all issues have been validated as conformant, now you need to make sure that your website stays fully conformant.
Summary
Most accessibility companies sell scan-based accessibility platforms which means we can’t use them to effectively track ADA compliance. However, with new audit-based platforms like Accessibility Tracker, now compliance tracking is possible.
