ADA Risk Mitigation

Not in the way the phrase suggests, and it's worth being straight about this. The Department of Justice has never issued a regulation setting an accessibility standard for private-business websites under Title III of the ADA, and WCAG has never been adopted as that standard. There is no ADA certification, and no one can issue you one. The Department of Justice's own Guidance on Web Accessibility and the ADA discusses making websites accessible without setting a technical standard for private businesses — which is precisely the gap vendors selling certification are papering over.

Title II is different: the April 2024 federal rule does set WCAG 2.1 Level AA for state and local government, with real deadlines — see ADA Title II & Section 508.

So for a commercial site, what actually exists is measurable risk, not a compliance certificate. What can be done is to remove real barriers, get your metrics below the thresholds that draw claims, and document it. Any vendor offering to make you “ADA compliant” or certified is describing something that doesn't exist.

We have written about this at greater length in Why 100% ADA Compliance Isn't Realistic.

If a demand letter, complaint, or lawsuit has arrived: get an attorney, and do it before you start changing things. An accessibility claim is a legal matter first and a technical one second. Your attorney decides what gets represented to the other side, what gets documented, and on what timeline — and quick cosmetic fixes made before anyone has scoped the claim can look like an admission without actually resolving your exposure.

Don't have one? Ask us. We have met hundreds of attorneys working these cases and keep a short list of the ones we would put in front of a client. No referral fee, no partnership, no arrangement of any kind — we stay in our lane, which is the code.

We work alongside your attorney, not in place of them. Our role is the technical half: an attorney-ready audit of what the complaint actually alleges, remediation of the barriers that are real, and documented evidence — before-and-after scan reports and screen reader videos — your counsel can put in front of opposing counsel. We do not give legal advice and we do not negotiate settlements.

If nothing has arrived yet and this is preventative work, you don't need a lawyer to get started — see demand letter response for what changes once one does.

No, and neither can anyone else. Any business with a public website can receive a demand letter, and no vendor controls who files claims or on what basis.

What we can show you is a rate. Fewer than 5% of our a11y.Radar clients who complete remediation, act on what the monitor reports, and stay below our risk thresholds have faced a new ADA lawsuit. For context, 46% of website accessibility cases filed in federal court in 2025 named a company that had already faced a claim. That figure covers filed lawsuits, which are public record; it does not include demand letters, which aren't public. Of the letters clients have told us about, those have been withdrawn, and the small number of repeat cases that were filed have tended to be dismissed.

No. We remediate accessibility issues in the site's own code. Overlay and widget products layer a scripted patch over an inaccessible site; they do not fix the underlying markup, and sites using them are more likely to draw further ADA demand letters and lawsuits, not less — UsableNet's 2025 lawsuit reporting tracks how often a site running one is named. Our engagements produce changes in the codebase, verified against the WCAG 2.2 success criteria themselves.

ADA Risk Mitigation is the faster, narrower engagement, and it's where most clients start — particularly anyone with a live claim. It targets the barriers automated scanning tools surface plus anything named in your case: the issues that actually drive settlement outcomes and put a site on a filer's list.

WCAG 2.2 AA / Section 508 Conformance is the fuller engagement, working through the standard systematically rather than by risk priority. It's what you need if you're a government agency, a federal contractor, or selling into either — and it's the natural next step once you're no longer exposed.

Both sit in the middle of a market with a tier on either side. Below them, overlays and widgets: cheap, quick to install, and no change to the code a claim is about. Above them, full-conformance programmes, typically five figures and up over months and often audit-and-report only, where implementation comes back to your team. The distinction worth understanding is that conformance and legal exposure are measured differently — an audit scores your site against the standard, while a claim is built from whatever a filer’s own tooling surfaces on the pages they visited. Targeting both is what Risk Mitigation is for. What to Look for in a Web Accessibility Vendor lays out all three tiers.

Whichever you prefer. We implement the fixes ourselves wherever we can, which is what most clients choose because it's faster and it's what we do all day. The alternative is that we audit, prioritise, and advise, and your own developers implement — a first-class option rather than a downgrade, and usually the right one when you have an in-house team that needs to own the code. The same choice applies to ongoing monitoring afterward.

Two things, and they're the reason our clients tend not to end up back in litigation. First, training for whoever maintains the site — your team, and any outside agency working on it. Second, ongoing monitoring with a11y.Radar, which catches the barriers that reappear as the site changes. Audit, remediate, train, monitor: that sequence is the formula, and skipping the last two steps is what puts a remediated site back on a filer's list.

Ask all of them the same questions, and listen for specificity — a vendor who does this work daily answers with details, and one who doesn't answers with adjectives. We wrote the list we'd want someone to use on us: What to Look for in a Web Accessibility Vendor. It covers the two answers that should end a conversation, ten questions worth asking, and the cases where a different vendor is the better fit. If you are still deciding which kind of vendor you need at all — a widget, risk-targeted remediation, or a full-conformance programme — Overlay, Remediation, or Conformance: Which Do You Need? compares the three and routes you by situation.