The Challenge

After a student complaint triggered an Office for Civil Rights (OCR) investigation, a regional public university with 18,000 students signed a resolution agreement requiring WCAG 2.1 AA compliance across all public-facing web properties within 12 months.

The university operated 60 websites across WordPress and Drupal, managed by a mix of central IT, college-level web coordinators, and department administrators. No one had a complete picture of accessibility status across the full estate. An initial manual spot-check of 10 sites estimated overall compliance at roughly 62% — but even that number was unreliable because there was no consistent scanning methodology.

The university had received quotes from external accessibility firms ranging from $180K to $300K for a full audit and remediation plan. The accessibility coordinator knew the budget wouldn’t stretch that far and still leave room for the actual fixes.

The Approach

Accorbis was deployed across all 60 sites, running automated WCAG 2.1 AA scans on every page. Within 48 hours, the platform had baselined every site with a compliance score and generated a prioritized violation report — 4,200+ individual issues categorized by severity, frequency, and estimated fix effort.

The accessibility coordinator used Accorbis’s cross-site dashboard to identify patterns: missing alt text and insufficient color contrast accounted for 60% of all violations and appeared across nearly every site. Instead of remediating site-by-site, the team tackled violation types across the entire estate — fixing the theme-level contrast issues once and rolling the fix to all 34 WordPress sites simultaneously.

Monthly trend reports showed progress in real time, giving the OCR liaison concrete evidence of good-faith improvement at each quarterly check-in.

The Results

Six months into the 12-month timeline:

• Overall compliance rose from 62% to 91% across all 60 sites
• Critical violations dropped by 94% — from 1,200+ to fewer than 75
• $180K saved versus the lowest external audit quote, with more comprehensive coverage
• Quarterly OCR reports were generated automatically, eliminating weeks of manual documentation
• The remaining 9% gap was concentrated in legacy PDF documents — a known, scoped problem with a remediation plan in place

“Accorbis turned an existential compliance crisis into a manageable project. We went from panic to a plan in 48 hours, and from 62% to 91% in six months. The OCR liaison said our reporting was the most thorough they’d seen.”

— Accessibility Coordinator