WCAG 2.1 AA is a set of technical guidelines for making websites usable by people relying on screen readers, keyboard navigation, and other assistive technology. The ADA itself doesn’t spell out web-specific requirements, so WCAG 2.1 AA has become the benchmark U.S. courts and DOJ guidance actually point to when they evaluate a site. It’s also what we build and repair against, alongside our own internal Optik standards.

It depends on your situation, and we’ll be straight with you about it. If you run a government site, it’s mandatory now, not optional. If you’re in a lawsuit-prone industry like retail, restaurants, healthcare, or financial services, the risk is real and rising. For everyone else, historically the risk for a small business has been lower, which is part of why we don’t force accessibility into every project. We offer it to every prospect and encourage it either way.

Not really. Overlay widgets promise instant compliance from a single line of code, but they tend to paper over problems instead of fixing the underlying code, content structure, and markup. Courts have started seeing through them in lawsuits. We don’t sell that as a solution.

Those fall outside our scope, and we tell you that upfront. PDFs uploaded to your site are yours to test. Video captions are your producer’s responsibility. Third-party APIs, code snippets, and iframes aren’t something we can fix directly, but if we spot an accessibility problem in one during a Review, we’ll flag it and usually recommend swapping to an accessible external link.

A Review is audit-only: we scan and manually check your site and hand you a report with the issues and an estimated cost to fix them, no fixes included. Repair is the actual fix work, either based on a Review’s findings or done directly if you’re on an Optik Theme 5.0+ site. The Care Plan is ongoing: quarterly reviews, training, priority repair, and email support, for clients who want accessibility handled on a continuing basis instead of a one-off project.