How SiteCare Launched Their Accessibility Service

The Challenge:
Caught Between Clients and Compliance

Ryan Sullivan knew his team at SiteCare was in a unique position. As a WordPress support and maintenance provider serving nonprofits, government agencies, and businesses in highly regulated sectors like finance and healthcare, they were already working at the code level on their clients’ websites daily.

But when accessibility concerns started coming up more frequently, including one client who faced action from the Department of Education, SiteCare found themselves in an awkward middle ground.

“Clients would come to us with some kind of report from a third-party tool or they’d hire an accessibility expert who didn’t do implementation,” Ryan explains. “The expert would just say, ‘here’s all of your problems’ and hand it over like a gift. Then the client would hand it over to us and say, ‘okay, now what?'”

SiteCare could interpret the reports and knew what good accessibility looked like from a development standpoint, but they weren’t really providing accessibility services. They were just quoting development work for remediation. They were looking for a way to offer more robust and proactive accessibility services.

The Search for the Right Tool

Ryan and his team knew that to create a great client experience, they needed to provide their own reporting, show iterative improvement over time, and stop being just an “implementation go-between.”

They evaluated several accessibility tools, including SiteImprove, SilkTide, and others, but kept running into roadblocks. Some tools had measurement or reporting approaches they weren’t fans of. Others didn’t like SiteCare’s business model of managing scanning and reporting for multiple clients, preferring to sell directly to each individual company instead.

Then Ryan spotted AAArdvark on LinkedIn.

“I messaged Nathan and said, ‘Hey, what is this? What have you been hiding?'” Ryan laughs. “I think we’re one of the pretty early adopters.”

Smooth Sailing from Day One

The onboarding process was refreshingly straightforward.

“It was intuitive, honestly. We found our way around quickly,” Ryan says. “Our account managers and developers have experience with lots of different SaaS apps, so we kind of knew what to look for, but AAArdvark made the onboarding piece really easy.”

What SiteCare wanted initially was simple: provide existing clients with a snapshot of their accessibility issues as a way to introduce the concept and potentially sell professional services. AAArdvark made this effortless. They could add websites, scan key pages, and run both manual and automated testing with minimal training needed.

“We did very little education or training around how to use it,” Ryan notes. “Our account managers all use it all the time now.”

A New Way of Working

Today, AAArdvark has become central to SiteCare’s daily operations:

Account managers use it in two key ways:

• Prospecting: Scanning existing client sites to identify accessibility issues and start conversations about improvements.
• Progress monitoring: Ensuring the number of active issues consistently decreases for clients on accessibility retainers.

Developers treat it like a task list:

• They see exactly which markup needs fixing.
• They get clear guidance on correct implementations.
• They can knock out issues systematically, often tackling widespread problems first (like fixing 900 instances of a color contrast issue with one line of CSS).

“It’s really helpful for them to see AAArdvark flag literally the exact markup that needs to be fixed and tell them, ‘here’s what a correct implementation would look like,'” Ryan explains.

Real Results:
From Rebuilds to Steady Progress

The tool has enabled SiteCare to help clients in dramatically different ways depending on their needs.

Complete Transformations: For some clients, AAArdvark’s audit revealed so many issues that rebuilding made more sense than refactoring legacy code. SiteCare developed “reboots” where they keep sites visually the same while replacing the entire front end with clean, accessible code.

One standout example is a nonprofit related to foster care. Their audit revealed numerous issues with their page builder setup, so SiteCare rebuilt the entire site using WordPress blocks and accessibility best practices. The project went from start to launch in less than three weeks.

“They never would have had that if their motivation wasn’t accessibility,” Ryan reflects. “Having AAArdvark there to raise that awareness was awesome.”

Steady Improvement: For complex food publisher sites (with thousands of pages and heavy advertising), SiteCare takes a different approach, methodically working through non-ad-related accessibility issues and showing consistent monthly progress.

The Accountability Factor

One feature Ryan particularly appreciates is how AAArdvark handles resolved issues that reappear.

“When it flags issues that have been marked resolved but then says, ‘hey, this thing reopened,’ instead of just adding another issue to the list, it says, ‘I think this was resolved once, but it’s not anymore.’ That’s honestly really helpful from an accountability standpoint.”

This creates opportunities for both quality assurance and client education, helping prevent clients from shooting themselves in the foot by recreating resolved issues.

The Unexpected Transformation

What started as the adoption of a handy new tool turned into something much bigger. Since implementing AAArdvark, SiteCare has:

• Launched a complete accessibility service that they actively promote
• Trained their entire team on accessibility principles and language
• Built accessibility checks into their deployment pipelines to prevent shipping inaccessible code
• Grown to serve 30+ clients with regular accessibility services, all within just 2-3 months

“We’re not just the implementer anymore, we’re the consultant too,” Ryan says proudly.

Perhaps most surprisingly, the accessibility mindset has permeated the entire company culture.

“We have these internal conversations about solving technical problems for our clients and we go, ‘oh well, we could do it that way, but that’s not going to be as accessible as we want it to be,'” Ryan explains. “We’re keeping each other in check in a way that I didn’t anticipate. That was unexpected to me—to see everybody just fully wrap around it in a cool way.”

Why AAArdvark Works for Agencies

For Ryan, AAArdvark’s agency-friendly approach sets it apart from other tools:

Pricing Model: “I really like how the number of pages drives the plan tier you’re on. You can have two websites that are wildly different from each other, and to pay the same amount for a basic restaurant website and a website that’s been on the internet for 15 years with a million pages just never made sense.”

Multi-Client Management: “The way the tooling and reporting is set up silos these different websites off in a way that allows you to serve individual clients. I looked at a lot of these tools and didn’t see anything similar anywhere else.”

Simple Reporting: SiteCare keeps client communication straightforward, showing the previous month’s issue count versus the current month. “If the number’s going down pretty consistently, we’re not even giving much explanation. It’s really just like, ‘hey, last month you were here, this month you have this many, we’re headed in the right direction.'”

The Bottom Line

“Other than to just do it, like just give AAArdvark money,” Ryan laughs when asked what he’d tell other agencies considering the tool. “It really is the best combination of pricing structure and functionality that matches up with an agency’s actual needs.”

The transformation at SiteCare proves that the right tool can do more than solve a problem. It can unlock entirely new opportunities. From reluctant implementers to confident consultants, they’ve built a thriving accessibility practice that serves their clients better while growing their business.

“Thank you for building this,” Ryan concluded. “It really has been great.”