Episode 29: In this episode, Jim Ray sits down with digital marketing expert Bill Reynolds to break down the growing importance of ADA website compliance and the WCAG 2.1 guidelines. They discuss how new regulations impact businesses, especially those receiving government funding, and outline key deadlines for 2026 and 2027. Bill explains how accessibility goes beyond basic features, requiring structural and technical adjustments to ensure all users can navigate a website. The conversation highlights common compliance gaps, including PDFs, images, and user interface elements. They also explore the risks of non-compliance, including potential fines and legal exposure. Bill shares practical solutions, including ongoing monitoring and third-party validation tools to maintain compliance. Jim emphasizes the importance of proactive action rather than waiting until deadlines approach. The episode ultimately encourages business owners to treat accessibility as both a legal requirement and an opportunity to better serve their audiences. Jim Ray: Welcome to Grow for It. It's a podcast for small business owners, managers, and professionals. The goal is to give me a chance to work with the space between your ears on your mindset to help you focus on the things that really matter to your success. I want to enable you to concentrate on pursuing your vision, setting meaningful goals, and engaging in the day-to-day activities that will have the biggest impact. Thanks for tuning in. I want to go ahead and introduce a friend of mine. This is Bill Reynolds. He is the founder and president of Element502. They're a digital marketing agency here in Louisville, although they work with clients all across the country, including several of mine and my website as well. Bill, thanks for coming in. Bill Reynolds: Hey, thanks for having me. Jim Ray: Well, I tell you what, a while back I got a flyer or saw some kind of information about a new ADA compliance issue that popped up that I knew was going to affect my clients, and you're kind of my go-to guy on this kind of stuff. So I asked you to come in and we wanted to talk about this. Back in 2024, the DOJ really kind of finalized though the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines WCAG 2.0, and this is Level AA, so it was like double secret probation stuff we're dealing with. Anyway, the biggest issue is right now a lot of people are exposed due to ADA non-compliance issues that potentially can lead to some serious fines coming up. But there are two different timeframes that we're going to be worrying about right now, the 2026 version, and then we'll talk a little bit more about the 2027, which is going to bring in people like me as a consultant, more service-based type professions in particular, a lot of law firms are eligible for this issue. So Bill, why don't we back up a little bit and kind of just talk about what is this Web Content Accessibility Guideline issue? Why is it here? Bill Reynolds: Sure. And the acronym is WCAG, so if you hear me say it, that's the very short term. Basically what the government came out with their guidelines was that your website needs to be ADA compliant and accessible just like your brick and mortar. So when you go to a new building, it's got ramps, it's got handicap accessible bathrooms, it's got counter height. There's all kinds of things about width of different doorways of aisleways, all these things. That's the accessibility so that everyone can access your building. Now, in older buildings, there's always a grandfather and there's some rules around it because again, it's not saying it's okay to make it inaccessible, but there's also a burden of cost, a burden of things. And so the government did the same thing for websites, and so they said, Hey, your website needs to be compliant. And you mentioned it, the 2026, it's April of 2026 is the deadline for anybody who basically, the simplest way is if you get money from the government, you need to be compliant. So that's going to be a lot of your healthcare, especially whenever you get Medicare, Medicaid, any of these government assistance programs that are in there. If you're housing and you get government assistance for housing and authority, if you are a school, municipality, public parks, any of these things, those all are supposed to be because they want to make sure that your website is accessible and easy to use just like your brick and mortar would be for any of your customers. Jim Ray: When you and I go to a website, I mean obviously we can see what's on the screen. We can dink around, we can click different things. We can fill out forms, but somebody that has some disabilities has some other challenges, may not be able to read it, may not be able to hear different things that are on there. So again, the ADA compliance issue is a great thing. I mean, it's really going to open up the web to a lot of people who up to now have struggled to some point. The good news is this is just one more layer that allows us to make sure that even structurally, it's not just the overlays that you have to worry about. This is something that actually gets into the coding and the structure, which is again, why I always use you as my go-to guide and say, Hey Bill, what are we dealing with here? Bill Reynolds: Yes. And because a lot of times you'll see, you'll go to a website and people just think like, oh, well it's for sight-impaired people, so they're going to use a screen reader. Well, that's just one of a whole litany of different disabilities as defined by the Department of Justice, as defined in this WCAG. One of them I always point out is even ADHD is covered in this WCAG. And so focus banners, all these things have to be in there. And it's not just the website itself, it's any content that you make available. So if you have PDF downloads, those have to be accessible by a screen reader and different things. And a lot of times the built-in print to PDF function, that's in a lot of our computers, whether it's on MAC or PC, where you can print as a PDF, it technically creates a PDF, but that PDF is not ADA compliant. It has too much extra information on it. There's some cleanup that has to happen in there for it to truly be compliant. And any piece of content that you serve from your website is covered just as much as the website. As far as this WCAG 2.0 compliance issue. Jim Ray: As I was reading through some of this, they were even talking about the images on the website. From an SEO standpoint, for years we've used data that kind of tells the internet, Hey, this is what this picture is. But a lot of people don't do that. So that alt image text, a lot of people still don't do that, but that is now being enforced under this compliance issue. So these are not simple fixes. I mean, they're not, oh my gosh, my website is completely wrong, but there are some things now that we need to as a society move forward to. And now the DOJ is going to be coming in saying, yeah, we're going to help you with that compliance issue and we're going to back it up with some fines. Bill Reynolds: Well, yeah, and I mean it goes to color contrast, layout, any kind of movement that's on your website or sound, those have to be able to be turned off, especially whenever we look for any kind of flashing or anything like that that turns into some of our compliance over flashing images, those kinds of things. All of these things are covered. And like you said, it's nothing that means that you usually, you don't have to tear the site down completely and rebuild depends on how old the technology is because some of these things we can go in behind it. It's just kind of like digging a basement in the house. It's already there. You can do it. Jim Ray: Okay, it's doable, but it's probably not something you as an individual want to take on yourself. There are so many different layers and aspects to this. Bill, you have a service. And that's another reason when I called you up to say, Hey, we share some clients together. And I said, are any of our clients going to be affected? And most importantly, it's my website going to be affected. And you said, actually, we already have a plan together for this. And that's where you explained to me what your capabilities are and I wanted to share that with the audience today. Would you walk us through what that is? Bill Reynolds: Sure. And I tell everybody the service we use is accessiBe. And if you want to try to go and do it yourself, you're welcome to. I don't hide any of it. What accessiBe does is it puts a script on your website. If you go to my website or any of the websites we protected, it's a little button down in the bottom right-hand corner. It's a little accessiBe guy. It's like a little stick figure guy. You can click on it. Inside of there, there's a whole lot of options on the website to be able to change it to where it's accessible for you. But the biggest thing that's important in there is the statement. It's the security statement at the top. Every month accessiBe scans the website and gives us a compliance statement that says that this website has been marked compliant, WCAG 2.1, it's a third party that does that verification for us, and they give you a certificate that's valid for every month. Now we scan it twice a month so that if there's any changes, and so this helps with any kind of content changes, new pages, new posts, maybe you're even putting up new PDFs, those kinds of things, it will catch those and flag those. It doesn't put that on the front of the website where it says, Hey, our website's compliant except for this. That's not what we put out there. But it does allow us to be able to be notified to be able to go in and make updates or changes to your site. Because once we put the script on, it runs for a couple of days on a new install, it runs for about five days. It's crawling through all the site. It's watching user
