ADA · By industry
ADA compliance for marketing agencies
ADA compliance for a marketing agency runs two ways: the client sites you build and ship have to work for a screen reader and keyboard, in line with the WCAG criteria courts and the Justice Department reference, and so does your own site, its portfolio, case studies, and lead forms. An inaccessible build is the client's legal liability and your reputation and contract problem at once. Complidar runs the same accessibility sweep a plaintiff's firm would, across up to 120 pages, so you can scan every client site before and after launch.
You built the site. Whose liability is the barrier?
When an ADA demand letter lands, it names the client, because their site is the public accommodation a disabled visitor could not use. But the client's next call is to whoever specified, designed, and built that site, and that is the agency. The barriers plaintiffs cite, images shipped without alternative text, a form coded without programmatic labels, a custom widget no one made keyboard-operable, are implementation decisions an agency made. So one inaccessible template becomes the client's lawsuit and the agency's awkward conversation, sometimes a contract dispute, at the same time.
The legal footing is settled and it is the same one every web case rests on. In Robles v. Domino's Pizza the Ninth Circuit held the ADA reaches a business's website and app where they connect to its goods and services, the Supreme Court declined to disturb that ruling, and the matter resolved around $325,000 plus fees. Whether Title III reaches a given client, and how a statement of work allocates the remediation, are questions for counsel; whether the site you shipped carries the barriers plaintiffs cite is what a scan answers.
Where agency work actually fails
The failures cluster on the surfaces an agency hands over, and on the agency's own marketing site, all of them mechanical and visible from the outside:
- Client sites shipped with decorative and product images that carry no meaningful alternative text, so a screen reader announces 'image'
- Lead-capture, contact, and 'request a quote' forms whose fields have no programmatic label, on the client's site and the agency's own
- Custom sliders, menus, and interactive sections built to look good but operable only with a mouse, not the keyboard or Enter key
- The agency's portfolio and case-study pages built from images of text and screenshots without alt text, so the work itself is announced as 'image'
- Low-contrast brand color used for body text, buttons, or captions that fails the WCAG contrast ratio across every site that inherits the palette
What it actually costs
The headline ADA verdicts are mega-retailer outliers, not an agency's number or a small client's. The realistic figure tracks the comparable small-business volume-suit band: ADA web matters against ordinary small businesses, cases like Mendizabal v. Nordstrom and Diaz v. Kroger, have resolved in the low five figures, roughly $12,000 to $22,000, plus the plaintiff's fees, often with no court appearance. The expensive part for an agency is multiplication: the same plaintiff's firm can send the same letter to a hundred sites a month because the barriers are identical, and if a dozen of those sites are ones you built from one inaccessible template, the exposure and the reputational hit land across your whole client book at once. We can show what is on each site; whether to remediate, who pays under the contract, and how to respond are conversations for counsel.
What the scan checks here
- Full WCAG / axe-core accessibility pass across every page of a client site or the agency's own, up to 120 pages
- Decorative and content images checked for meaningful alternative text on the sites you ship
- Form-field labeling on lead-capture, contact, and 'request a quote' forms
- Keyboard operability of custom sliders, menus, and interactive sections agencies build
- Portfolio and case-study pages flagged where the work is shown as images of text without alt text
- Color-contrast on brand palettes applied to body text, buttons, and captions across sites
Honest limits: A scan verifies what is mechanically detectable: missing labels, unreachable controls, contrast failures, broken focus. It cannot judge whether your alt text is genuinely descriptive or whether a custom widget you built is usable end to end in practice; those need human review, and the report marks which findings are which rather than implying a clean automated pass equals full conformance. It also does not read your statement of work or decide who owns a fix between agency and client; that allocation is a contract and counsel question, not a scanner's.
Common questions
A client got an ADA demand letter for a site we built. Are we on the hook?
The letter names the client, because their site is the public accommodation, but the barriers cited are usually things the agency coded: missing alt text, unlabeled forms, a mouse-only widget. Whether that becomes a contract dispute depends on your statement of work, which is a counsel question. What is not in question is whether the site has those barriers, and that is what a scan settles before the letter arrives.
Should we scan client sites before we launch them?
That is the cheapest place to catch this. Running the scan before handoff turns 'we shipped an inaccessible site' into a fixed punch list, and re-scanning after launch catches what new content and client edits reintroduce. Complidar is built to run per site across up to 120 pages in minutes, so a pre-launch and scheduled scan fits into a normal delivery process.
What does an agency website scan cost?
The preview is free: violation count, severity, and an estimated liability range across up to 120 pages, no account or card, on your own site or a client's. The full report with per-finding evidence and fixes is a one-time unlock, and monitoring re-scans on a schedule, which matters because client sites change constantly after you hand them over.
All 22 checks · up to 120 pages · no card
Last updated 2026-06-28 · Informational, not legal advice: how to read this