Designing Accessible AI Systems for SMEs: Compliance with ADA and Section 508 through Conversational Interfaces

With lawsuits related to the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) resulting in approximately $4 billion in annual economic losses for businesses, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) face significant cost pressures when developing accessible applications. This paper proposes an accessibility-focused conversational system based on an open-source natural language processing (NLP) framework, aiming to reduce legal risks for SMEs while enhancing digital accessibility for users with disabilities. The system integrates text-to-speech (TTS) and speech-to-text (STT) modules with a simple user interface, leveraging technologies such as Azure Cognitive Services, Play Framework, and MongoDB. Through example applications in online retail and restaurant ordering systems, the paper demonstrates the system's usability, ADA and Section 508 compliance, and seamless integration with existing content management systems. Experimental results indicate that the proposed approach significantly reduces development costs and improves the user experience for individuals with disabilities, providing a viable path for SMEs to implement digital accessibility and laying the foundation for future integration with large language models (LLMs) to enable more natural human-computer interactions.