What we’re noticing · ADA compliance
The Widget Has Already Been to Court
The most expensive small line on a town’s renewal quote is the toolbar.
The accessibility line on your renewal buys a toolbar, and a toolbar is not compliance. One question before you sign settles it.
Somewhere on your website vendor’s renewal is a line called accessibility. It is small enough to wave through. It buys a toolbar: a floating icon that promises your site now meets a federal standard your clerk could not pronounce under oath. In April 2025 the Federal Trade Commission fined the best-known maker of that kind of toolbar one million dollars for promising exactly that. The FTC also noted that the thing made some sites harder for blind users to use. The pitch you are about to hear has a docket number.
Invoices bury the lede. Here’s what yours leaves out: compliance does not live in a toolbar. It lives in the page. Are the headings real headings? Do the buttons have names? Does the form say what you got wrong? Does a screen reader walk the page in the order a sighted person sees it? A widget sits on top of all that like a doormat on a sinkhole. It cannot fix what the page was built without. In a complaint, it is not the defense. It is the exhibit.
If the site works with the widget off, the widget is a convenience, and you can decide what a convenience is worth. If it does not, you have just learned what the line item was for. It was never for the people it names. A complaint sees through appearances, and the complaint, unlike the widget, is free.
Where Rudder comes in as your partner
We run the widget-off test on our own work before a town ever sees it, because a page either walks in order for a screen reader or it does not. Send us the renewal and we will tell you, in one page, what that line item buys.
Ask your vendor
Show me the site with the widget turned off.
Receipts: FTC Decision and Order, Docket No. C-4817, April 21, 2025 (accessiBe, $1,000,000): press release · case page