About
A small Virginia shop that does this work carefully.
508 Guidehouse LLC is an accessibility remediation practice serving government, education, healthcare, nonprofits and private business. We are deliberately small, and the person who scopes your work is the person who does it.
Why we are not the cheapest option
There are upload portals that will quote your PDF in thirty seconds and charge four dollars a page. For a clean, simple document, that can be a reasonable deal.
What they cannot do is look at a badly built export, understand what the author meant, and rebuild the structure so it actually makes sense to someone navigating by headings. They cannot tell you that your table is unreadable because the headers were typed as bold text. They cannot answer the question your grant officer just asked you.
We work at a professional manual pace — roughly ten pages an hour on straightforward documents, slower on complex ones. That is the pace the work requires if the output is going to survive an audit.
How we got here
The practice is built on more than fifteen years of web design and digital accessibility work. Our principals have performed Section 508 document remediation and accessibility quality assurance on federal agency programs including HUD and USAID. That background is the reason we write conformance documentation the way federal reviewers expect to read it.
Contract-level past performance references are available on request.
What we will tell you
When your documents are already fine, that they are fine. When a job is smaller than you feared, that it is smaller. When a file is beyond economic repair and should be rebuilt from source instead of remediated, we will say that too, even though rebuilding is not what we are selling.
Credentials
- DHS Trusted Tester
- Department of Homeland Security certification in the Trusted Tester conformance test process.
- Key personnel experience
- Section 508 remediation and accessibility QA on federal agency programs including HUD and USAID.
- 15+ years in web design
- Standards-based front-end work predating the current compliance wave.
- Virginia SWaM
- Small, Women-owned and Minority-owned business certification through Virginia SBSD.
Tooling
- Level Access AMP
- Enterprise accessibility testing and reporting platform.
- CommonLook PDF
- PDF/UA validation and remediation.
- Adobe Acrobat Pro
- Tagging, reading order and accessibility checking.
- NVDA and JAWS
- Screen reader verification on every deliverable.
- PAC
- PDF Accessibility Checker for PDF/UA conformance.
What we promise, and what we cannot
We perform this work with professional skill and care, against the standard named in your scope of work, and we document what we did.
We do not guarantee that a third party, auditor, agency or court will find any deliverable conformant, and we do not guarantee that you will never receive a complaint. Accessibility conformance involves judgment, testing methods vary between practitioners, and content changes after delivery. Any vendor who promises you immunity from litigation is selling something other than remediation.
We are not a law firm and we do not give legal advice.
Work with the person who does the work.
No account managers, no handoffs, no offshore production line.