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Section 508 Remediation, and the Report Your Buyer Actually Reads

For the vendor or public team whose 508 review came back with a list, and whose buyer expects the next report to read differently. We do not clear findings. We find them, and we retest them after somebody else has cleared them.

What 508 Remediation Actually Involves

We sell the audit and never the fixing, which on federal work turns out to be the useful half. Your buyer is going to read a document saying what your product supports. When that document is written by the firm that did the repairs, it is a self-declaration about its own work, and everybody in procurement knows it.

Start with who Section 508 actually binds, because it gets repeated wrongly everywhere. It binds federal agencies and the Postal Service. It does not follow federal money, so a school or a clinic taking a federal grant is not bound by 508 on that basis. Vendors arrive through their contracts instead, which is why the buyer's requirement rather than the statute is what really sets your deadline.

The work then runs on two tracks and they budget separately, which is the part nobody warns you about. The web track means templates, forms and components fixed to the WCAG baseline the standard names. The document track means the PDFs and forms your site serves, tagged and readable, and it is routinely the more expensive of the two. Scope them apart, quote them apart, and schedule them apart, because one track finishing tells you nothing about the other.

Then the report, where one decision settles what the whole thing looks like. The conformance report template comes in four editions and they answer against different versions of WCAG. The 508 edition reports against WCAG 2.0, because that is the version the Revised 508 Standards incorporate, so a 508 report carries 2.0 rows however recently you were tested. Agree the edition with your buyer before anybody starts filling one in.

And know what the template's own words mean, because a wall of green is worth less than it looks. Supports covers a product that meets the criterion by working some other way, which is a legitimate answer and a wide door. Does Not Support is defined as the majority of the functionality failing, which is why almost nobody ever writes it. Partially supports, filled from dated evidence and describing the gap, is a stronger document than a page of green a reviewer has no reason to believe.

What Our 508 Audit Hands the People Who Do the Work

  • Test to WCAG 2.2, which covers the 2.0 baseline the 508 standard names underneath it
  • Split the findings into the web track and the document track, so they can be quoted apart
  • Name the failing element and the remedy on every finding, criterion by criterion
  • Retest with real assistive technology once somebody else has done the fixing
  • Fill the report edition your buyer named, from dated evidence rather than from hope

What You Get

The findings list your suppliers price from, and the evidence your buyer reads. Every finding names the element, the criterion and the remedy, so a developer or a document vendor can act on it without coming back to ask what was meant.

Then the report, written from testing rather than from somebody's repair log. We write supports only where the retest actually proved it, which is a stricter bar than the template asks for, and where the honest answer is partially supports we write that and describe the gap.

What gives that document its weight is the thing we gave up to get it. We never touched your code, so no line in the report is us describing our own work. Your side keeps a plain trace from finding to fix to retest, ready for the next review, the next renewal, or the next buyer who asks how you know.

The Honest Limit

One honest limit, and it is the one buyers most need to hear. Nobody certifies Section 508 compliance, and nobody certifies a conformance report either, because no such stamp exists at any price. What a buyer accepts is a current report backed by testing, dated, and traceable to a page. We can give you that, and we can give it to you precisely because the fixing was somebody else's invoice.

What It Costs

The Section 508 audit is flat-rate at $499 Rapid or $1,499 Standard, and the retest afterwards is half price within 3 months. Preparing the conformance report is priced separately and quoted in writing, because the edition and the product scope decide the work. Clearing the findings is not on our price list at any number, which is exactly what lets us write the report about it.

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