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Free sample audit
Send me your website address. I test a sample of pages and documents and send back the actual failures — named, located, and mapped to the standard. You will know where you stand before any money is discussed.
Home / ADA accessibility compliance
Your documents have a federal deadline.
WCAG 2.1 AA remediation for US local government and federally funded organisations — the website, and the thousands of PDFs behind it. Audit first, so you know the size of the problem before you commit a budget to it.
£1,095 audit · remediation from £7/pageRather talk it through? Book a free 15-minute call
A screen reader treats an ordinary PDF as a picture of text. It either reads nothing, or reads a budget table sideways — a cell, then a footer, then a headline. The fix is called tagging: marking up what is a heading, what is a table, what order to read it in, and what each image shows.
Almost no public document library has ever been tagged. Fifteen years of council minutes, budgets, agendas, permit applications and public notices, all of them technically unreadable to the people the rule exists to protect. That backlog is the work, and it is the part that takes months rather than weeks.
The rules
Two federal rules, four dates.
- 26 April 2027 — ADA Title II, larger entities
Public entities serving 50,000 people or more. Standard is WCAG 2.1 Level AA, covering web content and electronic documents.
- 26 April 2028 — ADA Title II, smaller entities
Public entities serving fewer than 50,000, and all special district governments regardless of population.
- 11 May 2027 — HHS Section 504, 15+ employees
Recipients of HHS federal financial assistance. Community health centres, clinics, social service providers, universities.
- 10 May 2028 — HHS Section 504, smaller recipients
Recipients with fewer than 15 employees. Same standard, later date.
Brickwork Studio is not a law firm and none of this is legal advice. These are published compliance dates and a published technical standard. What your own exposure looks like is a question for your attorney.
What you get
Findings you can hand to a budget committee.
- Full WCAG 2.1 AA audit
Website and document library, tested against the standard the rule actually names. Every failure recorded with its location and severity.
- A counted document inventory
How many PDFs you actually have, which ones the public opens, and what each would cost to remediate. Most organisations have never had this number.
- Prioritised remediation plan
Ordered by public traffic and legal exposure, not alphabetically. Designed so a partial budget still buys meaningful coverage.
- Tagged, conforming documents
Reading order, heading structure, table headers, alt text, language and bookmarks. Verified, not auto-generated and shipped.
- An accessibility statement
Published page describing your conformance level, known exceptions and how the public reports a barrier. The rules expect one.
- Website fixes, if you want them
Contrast, focus order, form labels, headings and keyboard navigation. Same standard, same audit, priced separately so you can stage it.
Who it's for
Built for organisations with a compliance date.
Pricing
Fixed audit, per-page remediation.
- Sample audit — free
I test a sample of your live site and documents and send back the specific failures, with the standard each one breaches. No commitment, and you keep the findings either way.
- Full audit and remediation plan — £1,095
Complete site and document inventory, every failure catalogued, costed and prioritised. Written to be read by a board or a budget committee, not by a developer.
- Document remediation — from £7/page
Priced per page so the backlog can be worked in phases against whatever budget exists. Complex tables and scanned originals are quoted separately and always before the work starts.
- Ongoing compliance care — £149/mo
New documents remediated as you publish them, so the backlog never rebuilds. Cancels any time.
How it works
Three steps, no procurement theatre.
2
Full audit and plan
The complete inventory: every document counted, every failure catalogued, the whole thing costed and ordered by priority. This is the document you take to whoever approves the budget.
3
Remediate in phases
Work the backlog highest-priority first, in batches you approve. Each batch is verified before delivery. Purchase orders and invoicing are fine — most of my public-sector work runs that way.
Questions
The things people actually ask.
Documents count. The rules cover web content and electronic documents made available to the public — budgets, minutes, agendas, forms, notices, permit applications. For most organisations the document library is far larger than the website and takes far longer to fix, which is exactly why it is worth starting there.
An overlay does not touch your documents at all, and it does not make non-conforming content conform. Overlays have been the subject of accessibility litigation rather than a defence against it. If a widget is all that is in place, the underlying content is still non-conforming.
Start with what the public actually opens. Traffic on a document library is heavily concentrated — a small share of files takes the overwhelming majority of downloads. Fixing those first buys the most real-world accessibility per pound, and it is the order the plan is written in.
No, and be careful with anyone who says otherwise. What I can do is remediate your content to WCAG 2.1 Level AA and document that it conforms — which is the technical standard the rules name. Legal exposure is a question for your attorney, not your web contractor.
An independent studio, working remotely, one project at a time. That means no account manager and no bench — but it also means the person auditing your site is the person fixing it, and the price reflects the absence of everything in between.
It might — the Title II date has already been adjusted once. The work holds its value either way: a tagged document library is readable to the public, indexable by search engines and searchable by your own staff, none of which depends on a compliance date.
Also from Brickwork
Other things I build.
Find out where you stand. It costs nothing.
Send me your website address and I will send back the specific accessibility failures on your live site and documents — named, located, and mapped to the standard. Whether you hire me afterwards is a separate conversation.