Compliance Sheriff Review

Compliance Sheriff’s accessibility solution is driven by its business philosophy which is to make “all web contents accessible by every person in every place, every time.” Since 2001, Compliance Sheriff has been leading top institutions across education, government, travel, and trade to compliance especially with the different versions of the World Content Accessibility Guidelines and Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act.

Considering its wide range of services, we can confidently rank Compliance Sheriff with other end-to-end accessibility solutions. Compliance Sheriff, by Appgate, takes an all-inclusive approach toward accessibility and compliance. From accessibility testing to reporting, remediating and maintenance, Compliance Sheriff draws on many years of experience and expertise to deliver one of the finest accessibility solutions.

Like most other accessibility solutions, Compliance Sheriff takes a thorough approach to compliance to ensure that your digital property conforms with Section 508 and World Content Accessibility Guidelines. The web accessibility solution is exceptional for its testing standardization to eliminate guesses works from compliance testing. In addition to that, Compliance Sheriff supports automated checks against various US-based and international standards. The solution easily scales to your business demands, so you do not have to worry about your many sites or large page numbers. Compliance Sheriff always gets you covered.

Every web accessibility solution kicks off with an accessibility evaluation, and the importance of this cannot be emphasized enough. This testing process otherwise referred to as web accessibility audit or accessibility scan is synonymous with what medical doctors do with every patient before prescribing drugs or other medications. Compliance Sheriff runs an automated scan of the existing content on your website with out-of-the-box checkpoints. These checkpoints, which are designed based on international regulatory standards, can be customized for your business needs as well as expanded to accommodate other requirements. A big advantage that comes with this initial process is that it makes it easy to get what you want from a scan as against the very common website accessibility evaluation processes. You and your staff can easily choose which regulations and specific guidelines you wish to scan against, making it possible to customize web audits to industry standards.

Interestingly, Compliance Sheriff has been programmed to scan dynamic web contents as rendered pages rather than as source code. That is, the AI-powered system fully renders every page before scanning. The wisdom behind this is that much emphasis is placed on end-user experience and not the mere functioning of codes lines. This way, you are killing two birds with one stone: you are detecting structural deficits on the website as well as usability barriers. That sounds great, doesn’t it? The outcome of an accessibility audit is a report to show the state of affairs and create a pathway for progress. The report guides your team to those items and sections that require remediation. Complain Sheriff generates an accessibility evaluation report which allows your developers to easily identify the visual representation of issues as well as lines of source code. Typically, a report includes basic information about the scan including the number of checkpoints tested for, the number of pages scanned, and total scanning time. Next is the number of violations unearthed, the severity of threats, and manual checks. Also included are the top checkpoints cited in the scan, the top ten accessibility issues detected, the ten most affected pages of all pages scanned, and the results of recent revisions you might have made.

Since the aim of an accessibility scan is to chart a course for remediation, the next step in your compliance journey with Compliance Sheriff is remediation. The report leads your team toward retrofitting the website and makes clear-cut recommendations on priority areas. By using the “Revise Results” button, you can assess the *Result Revision Wizard*, as Compliance Sheriff calls it. This feature gives you more detailed information about your scan. It is through this gateway that you get to carry out a manual revision on incorrect results as well as those that do not apply to your website. Here, again, you can access scan failures and warnings regarding your accessibility status.

Through the dashboard, compliance directors and auditors can visualize, monitor, and report against standards across all departments. This visibility feature also makes it possible to correct errors before pages are published. Thus, the dashboard combines two functions of reporting and verification.

Support against lawsuit
Compliance Sheriff has provisions for your organization in the event you are being sued over accessibility. It does this by providing a comprehensive risk analysis to determine the most effective web solution for the situation. Added to that is the VPAT report to have a clear focus on which aspects of the compliance faults should be fixed first. Moving forward, they create an accessibility policy for future use.

Compliance Sheriff is a top player in education accessibility
Compliance Sheriff is the choice of many top educational institutions including California State University, Clemson University, and the University of Carolina. This, perhaps, is because Compliance Sheriff understands the nitty-gritty of web accessibility in education. Indeed, accessibility is crucial in education and must serve the needs of students, aspirants/applicants, faculty, parents, and employees. For best practices, all university campuses, faculties, and departments must adopt the same standards of web design. Regardless of whether different staff contributes to its content development, the website must at all times be usable for and accessible to all categories of people including those with disabilities.
To help educational institutions achieve accessibility and compliance, Compliance Sheriff renders automated testing for accessibility, remediation, and ongoing accessibility maintenance and monitoring for university websites, web applications, intranet, and e-learning systems.

Compliance Sheriff’s solution requires some level of expertise. For this reason, accessibility training is one of the core features of Compliance Sheriff and is aimed at providing concerned parties within an organization with working knowledge of accessibility as well as the several compliance guidelines. More often than not, this involves nearly all teams within an organization.

A host of web accessibility brands adopt a closed pricing system. For reasons best known to its board, Compliance Sheriff does not publish its service charge. In fact, you would not find any link or page dedicated to that on the whole of its website. So, how does one get started? The same way as other accessibility solutions with undisclosed pricing. You show interest by requesting a demo and they take it up from there. That said, Compliance Sheriff grants free access to a preliminary website accessibility audit on a dedicated platform, *Cynthia Says*. *Cynthia Says* is a public accessibility testing portal for free Section 508 and WCAG 2.0 accessibility scans. Besides scanning, Cynthia Says provides basic education about accessibility and compliance. I tried out this portal and was wowed by its efficiency.

To run a free scan, all you need to do is fill in a short form that requires your email address, website URL or link to a specific page, and the accessibility guideline you wish to test against. In my own case, I filled in a website URL, instead of a definite page, and selected WCAG 2.0 Level A Compliance criterion. In less than three minutes, the scan result unfolded into a long, comprehensive report of my website accessibility issues. Most of the issues found were design-related and the analysis is impressive.

Of course, Cynthia Says is meant only as a trial audit for personal use. So, it is not realistic to expect full service from this feature. That notwithstanding, the free tool shows what Compliance Sheriff is capable of and how well it does it. To be honest, Compliance Sheriff’s audit scan is one of the best I have seen. It is fast and comprehensive.