ADA compliance is the kind of thing that gets ignored until a demand letter shows up. For a hospitality brand running multiple luxury properties, the stakes are real. Lawsuits targeting hotel websites have been steady for years, and the rules keep changing as WCAG updates. SH Hotels (the group behind 1 Hotels, Baccarat Hotels, and Treehouse) needed somebody to audit the site, fix what was broken, and keep the marketing site compliant without slowing down the in-house teams already shipping new design and engineering work.
That’s where we came in.
Our role: orchestration, not solo work
We weren’t the only ones doing the remediation. SH Hotels has its own developers and works with outside design agencies, and the visual design and front-end work lived with those teams. Our job was to orchestrate the audit. We ran the testing, wrote findings up so devs could act on them right away, sat between the engineering, design, and legal teams, and made sure nothing fell through the cracks across the dozens of templates and components on the site.
In practice that meant running axe and Lighthouse on a schedule, manual passes with NVDA and VoiceOver, threads with the dev leads to triage what was a one-line ARIA fix versus rebuilding a whole component, and check-ins with their legal team so there was a paper trail of what got fixed.
The Results
Across the engagement we:
- ran the initial WCAG 2.1 AA audit and sorted findings by legal risk, user impact, and quick wins
- continue to do compliance reviews after every major template release
- work with the dev team and legal counsel to keep the remediation log up to date
- keep finding problem areas that pass automated scans but fail real assistive-technology testing, which is where most of the real problems are
The process
Auditing a hotel site is more tedious than it sounds. Booking flows are heavily interactive, the photography does most of the brand work, and every property has its own template. We use a combination of tools depending on what the site is built on. Other fixes that came out of the work:
- images and assets got proper alt text so users with low vision or screen readers get the same context everyone else does
- form labels and required-field indicators were rebuilt to announce correctly in assistive tools
- the “Book Now” reservation widget was reworked so it can be operated entirely by keyboard, and the date picker isn’t a dead end for screen reader users anymore
- property photography got new captions so guests can compare rooms and amenities without sight
Why this is ongoing
ADA compliance isn’t something you fix once. New properties launch, content gets refreshed, the dev team ships new components, and assistive tech itself keeps changing on iOS, macOS, Windows, and Android. So we run regular re-audits with SH Hotels and keep the issue log alive, which means problems usually get caught in QA instead of after a guest hits a dead end or a demand letter shows up.
For more information on ADA compliance audits for your website, call us directly at 561.526.8457. Thank you!
