Client & Context
ADA website remediation is where accessibility stops being a report and starts being code. Stephen Groner’s team engaged HalfAccessible in April 2026 to remediate a website against ADA expectations and WCAG 2.1 — and then, in a second phase with Michelle Dissel, to verify that work against the organisation’s SiteImprove monitoring and push the scores up.
The Challenge
Enterprise monitoring platforms like SiteImprove are unforgiving: every unresolved issue stays on the dashboard where stakeholders see it. The remediation had to fix real barriers — not just silence automated checks — and the follow-up phase had to reconcile every SiteImprove finding against the work actually performed, closing genuine gaps and documenting false positives.
Two-Phase ADA Website Remediation
Phase one addressed the core barrier classes at code level: semantic structure, image alternatives, form labelling, keyboard operability, focus visibility, and colour contrast — each verified manually with screen readers and keyboard-only testing against WCAG 2.1 criteria.
Phase two worked the SiteImprove queue item by item: confirming fixes were detected, re-fixing anything the crawler still flagged legitimately, and annotating items where the tool’s heuristic disagreed with the standard. Tool-driven scores only improve honestly when a human arbitrates that difference.
The Results
- WCAG 2.1 barriers remediated directly in the site’s code
- Every SiteImprove finding reconciled — fixed, re-fixed, or documented
- Measurable improvement in the organisation’s accessibility scores
- Both phases rated 5.0 out of 5.0 on Upwork
What Monitoring Tools Catch — and What They Miss
Automated platforms like SiteImprove are excellent at what they do, and what they do covers roughly 30–40% of WCAG failures: missing alternatives, contrast values, label associations, duplicated IDs. What no crawler can judge is whether the alt text is meaningful, whether focus lands somewhere sensible when a modal closes, whether the screen reader announcement actually describes the control, or whether the reading order makes sense. Those judgments require a human with assistive technology — which is why ADA website remediation guided only by a dashboard plateaus early.
Score methodology adds a second trap. Monitoring scores weight issues by their own heuristics, not by user impact, so chasing the score can mean fixing trivial items while real barriers persist. The honest approach treats the dashboard as a coverage map, not a verdict.
Our Reconciliation Process, Step by Step
- Export the full SiteImprove issue inventory and de-duplicate by root cause
- Fix genuine barriers at code level — semantics first, ARIA only where HTML cannot do the job
- Re-crawl and confirm detection, re-fixing anything legitimately still flagged
- Document false positives with standard citations so they stop reappearing in stakeholder reports
- Verify the user-facing result with screen readers and keyboard-only passes
The outcome is a score that rises because the experience improved — and stays up because the fixes addressed causes, not symptoms.
Frequently Asked Questions
Will fixing accessibility issues automatically raise our SiteImprove score? Mostly, but not one-to-one — scores follow the tool’s own weighting and crawl schedule, which is why we re-crawl and reconcile rather than assume.
What about issues the tool flags that are not real? We document false positives with standard citations so they can be dismissed confidently in stakeholder reporting instead of haunting every quarterly review.
Does ADA compliance require a specific score? No — the ADA references the experience, not a vendor metric. Scores are useful trend lines for stakeholders and budgets, not legal thresholds, which is exactly why human verification has to sit alongside the dashboard in any serious remediation programme.
Watching Your Own Dashboard?
If your SiteImprove, axe, or Lighthouse scores have plateaued, our accessibility remediation service fixes the underlying barriers — and our audits catch what monitoring tools cannot. Request a free assessment to get started.
