When receive a ticket or question about ADA compliance also known as the Americans with Disabilities Act, the first thing we should do is assess the situation.


Are they being approached legally by a third-party? Are they just asking for information about their website? Are they asking for recommendations for ADA widgets and tools?


If a client is being subject to a lawsuit or complaint, this should be referred to your manager to make sure we doing everything appropriately.


If they're asking for information about their website, the first thing we're going to do is scan the site. There are a number of reputable ADA scanning tools out there. Google Lighthouse, Axe Developer Tools, Wave, etc. We will run the site through these tools to see if anything stands out. Some of these fixes may from time to time be on our end, others we may ask the customer to fix and make sure they follow the same practice when changing in the future. The results of our scan can be run past the development team and they'll help determine how best to solve.


If they're asking for ADA widgets or tools, we have partnered with accessiBe, the leading ADA compliance tool and support team in the industry, in order for them to be associated with Thinkspace they need to go through our special sign up link: https://accessibe.com/a/adk8y6a. Once they've signed up, we can help them install on the site; similar to other embeddable tools, this is added with a short bit of JavaScript code typically to each page.


For educational purposes, ADA for websites is mostly driven by a web standard known as WCAG or Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, they are the industry group that leads discussion and implementation of best practices for websites and web applications. In recent years there have been a number of opportunistic lawyers that have targeted and threatened jewelry stores and other online retailers with lawsuits pertaining to ADA compliance. This is typically an easy complaint for them to submit, they run the website through a scanning utility and if it has any issues they will move forward with the complaint. This typically happens in mass, they'll have one disabled client that they'll use to target multiple businesses with.


In order to combat this, website developers need to stay up-to-date with recent WCAG standards, as of writing this the current standard is WCAG 2.1