Why it exists
The ADA Title II rule holds a five-person town office to the same standard as a big city with a web team. Most accessibility tools are priced and written for the big city, often with the price hidden behind a sales call. AccessClerk posts its price, starts with a free preview, and explains every finding in plain English, so the person who answers the phone at town hall can act on it.
How the checks work
Finding your pages and documents
We read your sitemap, when the site lets us, and follow the links from your home page the way a visitor would, up to 500 pages (10 in the free preview). Login, search and shopping-cart pages are skipped. Every link to a PDF, Word, Excel or PowerPoint file goes on the document list, including the links without a file extension that CivicPlus and Granicus sites use. Files hosted by other organizations, such as state forms, are listed separately: only they can change them.
Testing each page
Each page is opened in a real Chrome browser, so menus and content that scripts add are tested the way residents see them. We then run axe-core, the open-source accessibility engine from Deque Systems that also powers the accessibility checks in Google's Lighthouse, limited to the WCAG 2.1 Level A and AA rules that the Title II rule adopts.
Checking your PDFs
In a full inventory we download every PDF on your site (up to 25 MB each) and read its structure, without changing it. We check what a screen reader needs before it can read anything: whether the pages hold real text or just pictures of text, whether the file is tagged, whether its images have alt text and its form fields have labels, whether it has a title and a language, and whether its security settings lock screen readers out. Each document gets a plain-English list of what to fix, and the report explains how to fix each problem in Word or Acrobat. A free preview checks a sample of your PDFs.
Turning results into a plan
Every finding is rewritten in plain English: what's wrong, who it affects and how to fix it. When a problem shows up on most pages or in the same spot on many pages, or can only be fixed in the site's code, we mark it for your website vendor; the rest is content your staff can fix. Documents are dated from what the server reports, the file itself or a date in the link, such as a meeting date, then sorted into fix first, possible archive and needs review.
What automated checks can't do
Software can find a missing label or description, but it can't tell whether a description is accurate, whether a page makes sense read aloud, or whether everything works with a keyboard alone. Those need a person. That's why we never say a site passes or complies, and why every report spells out what it can't tell you. Use AccessClerk to find and sort the work, then test your most important pages by hand.
What we never do
- Log in, submit forms or change anything on your site.
- Add an overlay or widget to your site. We tell you what to fix in the site itself.
- Tell you your site is compliant, or give legal advice.
Paying
The whole-site inventory is $249, one time, paid by card through Stripe's secure checkout. Government purchasing cards work like any other card. Stripe emails a receipt and a paid invoice to the address entered at checkout. There's no subscription, contract or account.
Contact
Questions about a report or about the checks: hello@accessclerk.com. Saw AccessClerkBot in your server logs? About our scanner explains what it does.