Don’t Break That White-Label Remediation: Agency Owners’ Guide

You hired someone you trust to fix a website you built. After an audit and remediation, it now meets WCAG standards. Congratulations to you and your client; you no longer have to worry, right? Uhhhh. Even when you hire someone for white-label website accessibility services, they audit and fix what’s broken – you’re not done. Web accessibility is less of a one-and-done thing and more of a process. The next update you or your client makes can knock your website out of compliance.

How do you handle something that is constantly a moving target? And keep your sanity?

You learn how to protect that investment you and your clients made. You cannot just go back to business as usual. That’s what caused you to do a web accessibility audit in the first place.

Instead, you need to know what steps to take after you finish remediation, how you might be breaking accessibility every day, and how to keep your clients informed, too.

Let’s break it down.

I see this happen a lot. When I meet with agencies to discuss our own web accessibility remediation and audits, they often think, “We just need to pay you this one time, right?”

I get that the answer “No, not true” doesn’t sound great. Who wants to hear that they can invest thousands of dollars into fixing a website only to be told someone could break it the very next day? Literally no one.

Web accessibility is an investment with an average 100:1 ROI. And while a web accessibility expert can fix your website, different content updates can unravel it within a few months. Every new blog post, image update, or new landing page puts you at risk.

Think of it like this. When you went off to college or moved out for the first time, you had to learn to cook. You can have someone stand next to you and make the meal for or with you, but it’s almost impossible to get the same result the next time you try and cook it. That’s because inevitably you probably let someone else do the bulk of the work without actually learning the recipe.

Web accessibility is the same. You hired someone else to come in and fix your recipe. Now you need to learn how to replicate it, again and again.

Before you think, “But I hired someone so I didn’t have to learn WCAG,” don’t panic. You don’t need to learn everything, because the foundation of your website has been fixed. What causes the problems the next day, six months later, or even two years later? Regular content updates.

I see these things all the time. A website is built correctly, works well, but the simple, easy basics of accessibility are missing. Worse is when someone paid for a remediation or VPAT and now their entire website is at risk again.

Some of those common problems include:

• Missing ALT text on new images: Maybe the ALT text exists, but it doesn’t actually describe the content or purpose of that image.
• Improper heading usage: I just saw this happen to a client’s website within 10 days of a hand-off. A new employee created a landing page with an H1 at the bottom of the page, and H3s where they should be H2s.
• Color contrast problems: A new infographic gets uploaded with bad contrasts, or a new page is created and someone chooses a font color that isn’t visible.
• Hiding form labels: A lot of designers think “inline” form labels look nicer, so they hide the actual label and just use the placeholder text.
• Bad link text: Someone uploads a new PDF resource (also an issue) and just links “Click Here.”

The biggest frustration for me is that these simple things can take just a few extra seconds of work. However, they often get overlooked because the people updating your website just don’t know any better. This isn’t about not caring. It’s often about ignorance.

This isn’t just about your team, either. If you’re like me, you like to train your clients to make their own small updates, post blogs, or swap out images. These are not necessarily the profitable changes your agency can be working on. But when you let a client run loose, you have to think not only about teaching your team basic web accessibility practices, but your clients, too.

Where do you even begin? Start with the small things they’re actually editing themselves.

Before you teach your clients, you need to know your team understands basic accessibility best practices. If you don’t feel comfortable doing this yet, I recommend starting by hiring a web accessibility expert to help you design a simple training process. My white-label website accessibility services clients can train with me and get a checklist to share with their clients to keep their content accessible moving forward.

Once you are comfortable with basic WCAG standards, you can put together some materials to help your clients understand what they need to do, too.

Whenever possible, we try to document the easy website changes our clients will be making. Either they get these SOPs through screenshot instructions (we love ScribeHow) or a video recording.

I know this might sound a bit controversial, but we don’t want to make all of the small tweaks. Instead, we offer training (the price is baked into our website build costs), so they feel comfortable working with their own website. Do many of our clients ask to never touch it again? Sure. But they have the resources to make an adjustment at 11 pm.

While not everyone will add new pages, change pictures, or delete old content, they may add new blog posts or events.

During the training period, work with your clients to see what they will be making changes to on a regular basis. Then, help them keep them accessible by providing a content checklist. This should include the accessibility steps they’ll need to take when adding content and images.

Remember how we said ALT text was one of the most common accessibility mistakes on a website? When you’re creating a checklist, ensure you’ve added an example of good ALT text and talk about how it needs to cover the context and purpose of the image.

This is one that many of my clients struggle with. Make sure to teach that you need to link descriptive text, not phrases like Click Here, Learn More, or Read More. This applies to buttons, too.

If your white-label web accessibility expert performed an audit, they should have included a color contrast guide. This simple test shows which color combinations are safe together. Many of your clients will be creating their own social media and website graphics, so it’s a great idea to pass these on to ensure they can keep their colors safe.

It’s important to keep an eye on the entire website. No matter how great you are, new staff start and don’t read the training documents, someone updates something and forgets a step, or a theme or plugin update causes new issues. When you work with your clients on basic accessibility, part of that is performing regular checks.

Work with your white-label website accessibility services partner to create the right plan for your client, but I often recommend no less than an annual audit. This ensures everything you’ve learned and taught is still being applied correctly.

This may feel like a lot to handle when you are hiring someone else to handle accessibility for you. You also can’t fully rely on fancy tools. Automated accessibility checkers only find about 30% of issues.

It’s time to invest in your WCAG education and get your team on the same page. Make it easy by joining our upcoming Creating Accessible Content course.

This simple course teaches you how to fix all the easy mistakes people make when adding new content to their websites. It will also help you have the language to teach clients how to fix their mistakes. You can even reach out and ask about a team discount so you can create the right processes in your business. Be the first to know when doors open soon!

It’s time to make web accessibility easy and keep those sites compliant.