Stay compliant after the fixes are done
Accessibility monitoring is how your website stays compliant after the remediation work is finished. Most businesses treat accessibility as a one-time project: run an audit, fix the issues, move on. But a website is not a finished document — it changes every week. New products, blog posts, plugin updates, theme upgrades, and redesigns all introduce fresh barriers. Accessibility monitoring catches that drift with recurring automated scans plus scheduled manual checks, so your WCAG 2.1 AA conformance holds up over time instead of decaying the moment your audit ends.
This is the difference between being compliant on one day and staying compliant every day — which is what ADA Title III exposure actually turns on.
Why websites drift out of compliance
A compliant site does not stay compliant on its own. Here is how conformance erodes between audits:
- New content without accessibility built in. A staff member uploads a product photo with no alt text, pastes a PDF that was never made accessible, or publishes a page with skipped heading levels.
- Plugin and theme updates. A platform update can change markup you never touched — breaking keyboard navigation, removing focus indicators, or stripping ARIA attributes.
- Design and brand refreshes. A new color palette can quietly fail color contrast requirements across hundreds of pages at once.
- Third-party widgets. Booking tools, chat widgets, and embedded forms are frequent sources of new barriers that your team did not write and cannot easily see.
- Marketing campaigns. Seasonal landing pages and promotions are built fast, shipped fast, and rarely tested for assistive technology.
Any one of these can put your site back in front of a screen reader user — or a serial plaintiff — with a barrier that did not exist last month.
What recurring monitoring includes
Monitoring is not just a scanner running on autopilot. Automated tools catch only part of the picture, so real monitoring pairs machines with people.
| Layer | What it does | What it catches |
|---|---|---|
| Automated scans | Recurring crawls of key templates and pages | Missing alt text, contrast failures, some ARIA and form-label errors |
| Manual spot-checks | Periodic testing by a human reviewer | Keyboard traps, illogical focus order, meaningless alt text, broken screen-reader flows |
| Change-triggered review | Re-testing after a redesign, migration, or launch | Regressions in newly changed templates |
| Remediation | A person fixes confirmed issues in the code | Durable resolution, not a patch over the symptom |
Automated testing reliably flags only a portion of WCAG success criteria — the machine-checkable ones. Judging whether alt text is meaningful, whether a screen reader (NVDA, JAWS, or VoiceOver) can actually complete a purchase, or whether keyboard navigation reaches every control still requires a person. That’s why our monitoring always includes a manual component. The trade-offs between the two approaches are covered in our guide on automated vs. manual accessibility testing.
The POUR principles — Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, Robust — are the lens every check uses, the same framework behind WCAG conformance levels A, AA, and AAA.
Why a scanner alone (or an overlay) will not keep you compliant
This is the most important thing to understand about monitoring. A dashboard full of green checkmarks is not the same as an accessible site, and an automated tool that claims to fix issues on the fly is worse than no tool at all.
Accessibility overlays market themselves as set-and-forget monitoring: install one script, and a widget supposedly scans and repairs your site automatically. In practice, overlays do not remediate the underlying HTML, they frequently interfere with the assistive technology a user already relies on, and they have not stood up in court. Thousands of ADA web lawsuits are filed each year, and a growing share name sites that were running an overlay at the time. Genuine monitoring flags a real problem and sends it to a human to fix — it does not paper over the barrier with JavaScript. See the evidence on why overlays don’t ensure ADA compliance.
Curbcut is deliberately anti-overlay. When monitoring surfaces an issue, a person remediates it in your actual code through our accessibility remediation service — the durable fix, not a cosmetic one.
How the subscription works
Monitoring is an ongoing service, so it’s priced as a subscription rather than a one-off project. The flow is straightforward:
- Baseline. We start from a current accessibility audit so monitoring has a known-good reference point to measure drift against.
- Schedule. Automated scans run on a recurring cadence sized to how often your site changes; manual spot-checks run on a set interval.
- Triage. A reviewer separates real WCAG failures from scanner noise — false positives are common and waste your team’s time if left unfiltered.
- Remediate. Confirmed issues are fixed in the code, and your documentation stays current.
- Report. You receive dated records of what was checked, what was found, and what was fixed.
Those dated records matter beyond peace of mind. If you ever receive a demand letter, a documented history of continuous monitoring and remediation is concrete evidence of good-faith, ongoing effort — far stronger than a single audit from two years ago.
Where monitoring fits in the bigger picture
Monitoring is the maintenance layer of a complete accessibility program. It assumes you have already reached conformance; if you have not, you start with an audit and remediation, then keep that investment from eroding. For organizations that must formally document conformance — for procurement, for Section 508 obligations, or for enterprise customers — monitoring keeps the underlying claims in your VPAT / Accessibility Conformance Report honest as the site evolves. A VPAT issued against a site that has since drifted is worse than none at all.
For the legal context, the DOJ has affirmed that ADA Title III applies to the websites of businesses open to the public, and the prevailing technical standard courts and regulators point to is WCAG 2.1 AA. None of this is legal advice — for guidance on your specific situation, consult a qualified attorney. Authoritative references worth bookmarking include the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative, ADA.gov, WebAIM, and Section508.gov.
Keep what you paid for
If you have invested in remediation, monitoring protects that investment. If you have not yet, it tells you exactly where you stand today. Either way, the goal is the same: a site that keeps working for every visitor, every week, without sliding back into the barriers you already fixed.
Start with a free accessibility scan to see your current baseline, or get in touch to talk through a monitoring cadence that fits your site and budget.