What is ADA?
ADA or The Americans With Disabilities Act, is an Act passed by congress protecting some of the rights of disabled people in America. We have written an extensive article on this subject, so I will not spend too much time on it here. If you have questions about this Act, what it is, what it means, how it applies to you, etc. please refer to this article here written by our ADA compliance expert.
This article will focus more on what compliance looks like for websites and what services are offered by digital marketing agencies to help with that compliance as well as what factors might affect the pricing that you see for those services.
ADA Compliance
Compliance with this Act is incredibly important to your business. You can face legal action and fees if you are not compliant, and those can amount to a hefty price tag. This is required by law, so it is crucial that you maintain compliance!
Digital marketing agencies focus mainly on helping businesses maintain compliance on their websites and customer-facing, digital fronts. This is also required by this Act, so we highly recommend that you get this updated as quickly as possible! Luckily, you don’t need to do it alone!
Websites and digital fronts are explained in the act here if you would like to dive into that any further, and then the actual compliance is also outlined in that massive document. As fun as it would be to get into all of that, we already have a team that has done that for you, so feel free to contact us here, and we can see what this would look like for your specific needs.
The easiest form of compliance is going to be through the addition of an ADA widget to your website. You can check out what a few of those would look like below.
ADA Management
So, if compliance is as simple as purchasing a widget and adding it to your website for a small fee, why would you ever pay an agency to manage this for you?
There are a few reasons why. First off, unless you are an expert in website development/design, it will probably be fairly difficult/complex to actually implement this on your website. An agency will have those experts on hand who will be able to easily implement this for you and ensure that it will be up and running without any issues. They will also be able to continually monitor it for you to make sure that it does not have any issues or to fix those issues quickly if it does have any.
Another reason is the actual management of your account. Who wants just one more thing to worry about? Nobody. If you work through an agency, they will take care of all the setup and ongoing maintenance that would be required with this widget. Plus, a lot of agencies have developed their own proprietary ADA software that they know better than anyone else, so they would be able to take care of you best!
Third, another service offered by agencies is that of a manual review and updating of your website if any ADA issues arise. Websites are updated almost constantly. Maybe you have a new product to feature, or you add a new blog post, or maybe you’re adding an entirely new section to your site. Whatever the case may be, websites are almost never static. This means that ADA compliance is an ongoing thing. You need to make sure that all of your updates and new content pages are also compliant with this Act. A widget will help you with this, but it will never be as good as an actual person looking over the back end of your website and ensuring that you are compliant in every way.
Agencies have a lot of expertise and training in this field, so it can be very beneficial to utilize the knowledge that they have already gained, and it can save you a whole lot of time to have somebody else monitoring this for you.
ADA Compliance Pricing Factors
There are really only two factors that should affect the pricing that you will pay for ADA compliance services.
If you look into those widgets mentioned above, you will find that most of them are priced out by actual traffic to your website. The more people you have looking through your website, the pricier it gets to maintain the compliance. If you have an agency manage this service for you, pricing will likely be similar, but it will really depend on how the agency has set that up. They might just have a single, flat rate that they charge for a management fee, or they might even go off of something like the size of your website.
Size is the other major factor especially if you are considering having the manual audit/review performed by an agency. This makes sense, though! If your website only has 10 pages of content on it, it will not be overly difficult to audit. If your website has 1,000 pages on it, then it becomes much more time consuming and complex to audit. So, in other words, the larger your website, the more expensive it will become. This would most likely be on a tiered system (up to 100 pages = $1,000/month, up to 500 pages = $2,500/month, etc.), but it could also be a flat rate depending on the agency.
ADA compliance can be fairly expensive, but it is not something that you want to take lightly. Plus, the government is actually more than willing to help you out by covering some of those costs for you! We explain this a little bit more in this article here, but basically you can get up to $5,000 in tax credits to offset what you have spent on ADA compliance! So, at the end of the day, it really won’t cost as much as it seems like it will.
Hopefully this helps you understand a little bit more about ADA compliance and the services that you might be able to find at a digital marketing agency.
We love helping people keep their websites compliant, because it keeps them out of trouble and it also helps to serve a very large percentage of the population that deserves to have easy access to the web just like the rest of the world!
If we can help you in any way with this, please do let us know by filling out this form here. We will be in touch very soon!