You commissioned a website. The agency delivered. The site contains blood, sweat, tears, and no small amount of your organization’s money. And then, you find out about Title II. Alternatively, you may receive a demand letter. The agency that built the site sends you a quote to remediate the accessibility barriers it created.

Here’s the question you should be asking: why didn’t they tell you those barriers were there or that the law requires equal access?

Accessibility audits are a growth business. Agencies and development shops that build websites often without a moment’s thought for screen reader compatibility, keyboard navigation, or WCAG compliance have quietly spun up remediation practices to clean up the mess afterwards. Even overlay companies have audit and remediation practices (which begs the question, if the overlay works, why do you need audit/remediation? But that’s a different article). The same hands that built the problem want you to pay them to fix it.

This should make you furious. It should also make you suspicious.

The disclosure problem

If your vendor knew enough about accessibility to scope and price a remediation engagement, they should have known enough to flag the issues while building the website in the first place. Accessibility isn’t obscure or new knowledge. WCAG has been around since 1999. Missing alt text, poor color contrast, unlabeled form fields, and inaccessible modals aren’t edge cases that slip through the cracks. They are the predictable output of a design and development process that never considered accessibility in the first place.

So, the question isn’t whether they can fix it. It’s why they’re offering to fix it for a fee, rather than designing or coding it correctly in the first place.

Remediating sites you built is not a service. It’s an admission of guilt.

When a vendor offers to remediate your site, they are telling you several things at once.

1)    They built something that excludes disabled users.

2)    They delivered it to you anyway.

3)    They didn’t consider accessibility an issue until you noticed.

4)    They would now like to be paid to address the consequences of their bad past decisions.

Rewarding that behavior with a new contract isn’t a matter of pragmatism. It’s establishing a very clear incentive: there’s money in building inaccessibly and more money in fixing it later. You don’t want to be the client that funds both ends of that cycle.  It’s no different than someone throwing sugar in your gas tank at a gas station and then offering to sell you a new engine.

The conflict of interest

Many vendors will offer to audit your site before quoting remediation, sometimes for free. It sounds generous, but it isn’t. An auditor who stands to win a remediation contract has an obvious interest in the severity and scope of their findings. Not necessarily through dishonesty, but through the perfectly human tendency to see what you’re looking for, and to frame findings in ways that support the solution you’re already trying to sell. Also, if this audit is not commissioned with attorney-client work product rules in mind, it will be Exhibit #1 in any accessibility litigation filed against your organization

An independent audit, run by a firm with no downstream stake in the work that focuses its entire business on only audits, will give you a much more trustworthy picture of what’s actually wrong. It’s the software equivalent of Kelley Blue Book or Consumer Reports. This approach will also give you leverage. You’ll know exactly what needs fixing before anyone starts quoting. You may even take that information and consider a warranty claim against your original site-building agency.

What you should do instead

Get an independent accessibility audit from a specialist who does not build sites. This would preferably be someone who focuses entirely on audits, who staffs with certified professionals and people with disabilities.  At a minimum, this needs to be someone with zero relationship with your current vendor. Disabled auditors and consultants who test with assistive technology they use daily will find things that automated tools miss, and they won’t be pulling their punches.

Then, armed with that report, decide who gets the contract to fix the bugs. Maybe it’s still your original vendor, because they have codebase knowledge that will lessen ramp-up time.  If they’re genuinely willing to own the failure and work under scrutiny, that can be fine.  Offering a discount for the work is even better.   But they should be working to a specification they didn’t write, overseen by someone who isn’t them, with clear acceptance criteria tied to real user testing.

The Bigger Picture

Inaccessible websites don’t happen by accident. They are the result of processes, timelines, and commercial relationships that don’t treat disabled users as people who matter. Remediation, done correctly, is an opportunity to change that.  Your organization is choosing to change how you commission and evaluate digital work going forward.

But that change is not best executed by the people who had every opportunity to get it right the first time and didn’t. It comes from holding your initial vendors accountable, bringing in independent expertise, and making it very clear that next time, accessibility is in scope from day one.