Intended audience: AudioEye customers
What is AudioEye's Accessibility Protection Status?
The AudioEye® Accessibility Protection Status feature, found on the site dashboard, classifies sites into four levels of increasing protection from legal and reputational accessibility risk:
- No Protection: Sites registered on the AudioEye Platform but inactive or without the AudioEye script installed to provide accessibility monitoring and fixes are unprotected from legal or reputational risk.
- Automation: Sites that receive automated accessibility fixes and 24/7 active monitoring have limited accessibility protection. These sites have access to the Legal Action Response Plan, Trusted Certification, and Accessibility Statement. AudioEye encourages customers with this level of service to consider adding expert services to find and fix accessibility issues that automation cannot detect or fix.
- Managed: Sites receiving AudioEye’s managed services receive expert audits, custom fixes, and custom legal responses. AudioEye’s expert auditing and custom-fix services close the automation gap by engaging accessibility experts to detect and fix accessibility issues that require human intervention. Sites receiving this level of service are 300-400% less likely to receive a valid legal claim. Also, in addition to the legal resources available at the automation level, if a site with managed services receives a legal claim, AudioEye experts will evaluate the claim and produce customized response documents based on that claim.
- Managed with Assurance: Sites that receive fully managed services with AudioEye Assurance receive the highest level of accessibility risk protection. In addition to the protections and documentation provided by automated and managed services, AudioEye Assurance covers settlements or judgments resulting from WCAG violations and provides additional legal protection.
The Accessibility Protection Status component on the site’s dashboard shows the site’s level of protection at a glance. It provides suggested next steps for organizations that want to increase their protection level.
Why is AudioEye moving away from offering an accessibility score?
Accessibility Protection Status replaces the Accessibility Score component on the Site Dashboard. Although the concept of an accessibility score has become popular in the industry, there is no agreed-upon industry standard for calculating a score. Since each accessibility provider’s score is proprietary, they are all calculated differently. Additionally, conformance to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) requires considerations that a numerical measure cannot represent. Accessibility scores cannot be used to argue that a site conforms with WCAG or meets any particular legal standard.
There are many other problems with accessibility scores, chiefly:
- Scores create a false sense of security as they only reflect issues found with automation. Many high-impact, high-risk accessibility issues cannot be found and measured by automated processes. A high accessibility score means nothing when a site’s users cannot complete a purchase, make an appointment, write a positive review, or find the information they need.
- Scores often oversimplify complex issues by reporting accessibility issues requiring complicated or complex interventions the same way they report more straightforward, easier-to-fix issues. One complex issue may require the same amount of time and effort to fix as twenty or more easy-to-fix issues. A single score cannot adequately measure and convey these nuances.
- Scores fail to reflect user diversity by assuming all users have similar accessibility needs when, in fact, users with different disabilities often have very different needs. The severity of any particular accessibility issue depends upon the user’s context, and a single score simply cannot account for this diversity. In the same way that a site may be accessible to a user with a hearing disability but entirely inaccessible to a user with a visual disability, a score may be a fairly accurate representation of a site’s accessibility for some users with disabilities but not others.
A lower accessibility score could help propel an organization to take action to solve accessibility issues, and a higher score may recognize that an organization has made efforts to address accessibility issues. However, the only truly accurate measure of accessibility is the user experience, which simply cannot be distilled down to a single number, nor does a score help organizations understand and plan for the next steps in their accessibility journey.
Who will see the Accessibility Protection Status component?
AudioEye is committed to clear and transparent customer communication. Beginning in November 2024, new customers will receive the Accessibility Protection Status experience in lieu of an accessibility score in their site dashboard experience.