Make Every ArcGIS Map on Your Agency Site ADA Compliant

You are responsible for the accessibility of your agency’s website, and you already know the maps are the part that fails. Audiom from XR Navigation is the only Esri-partner solution that makes any ArcGIS map usable across audio, screen, keyboard, and braille, on the same feature layers your GIS team already publishes. Be the person who closes the map gap before April 2027.

The map on your site locks out one in five constituents

Federal, state, and local agencies publish thousands of ArcGIS maps every year. By default, more than one in five constituents cannot use them. Blind, low-vision, colorblind, deafblind, mobility-impaired, low-literacy, autistic, and cognitively disabled users are all locked out, and most agency maps fail Section 508 (Opens an external website), the 2024 DOJ ADA Title II rule (Opens an external website), and Section 504 obligations on grant recipients (Opens an external website).

A blind constituent loading a planning map, a flood-risk map, a benefits-locator map, or a polling-place map hears “blank.” A low-vision user cannot zoom past 200% without labels overlapping into noise. A colorblind user cannot tell a hazard zone from its surrounding terrain. A user with limited hand mobility cannot operate pan-and-pinch gestures. A low-literacy or cognitively disabled user cannot extract meaning from a dense legend. An autistic user is overwhelmed by visual clutter and cluttered color choices a non-autistic user filters out without thinking.

Turn-by-turn directions, AI summaries, and data tables are not a fix. They strip out the spatial relationships that let a map answer questions a list cannot, like the shape of the building on the top-left corner of the map.

What happens if the map gap is still open in April 2027

The 2024 DOJ ADA Title II rule (Opens an external website) requires every state and local government, and every public entity that contracts with one, to bring digital content to WCAG 2.1 AA (Opens an external website) by April 2027. Federal agencies have been bound by Section 508 (Opens an external website) since 1998, and by Section 504 (Opens an external website) on grant recipients since 1973. Maps published on agency websites, kiosks, and indoor wayfinding systems are squarely in scope.

Digital accessibility lawsuits rose 24% in 2025 (Opens an external website). Legal fees can be $350,000 per complaint (Opens an external website).
Demand letters arrive in volume. Each one costs roughly $25,000 to respond to (Opens an external website), and one agency can receive many.
Federal grant recipients risk Section 504 findings (Opens an external website) that put future funding at risk.
Every month a complaint sits open is a month a constituent who needed the map could not use it.

The map is the easiest thing on the site to point at and the hardest thing to retrofit. Lawyers and users will find it first.

We have spent ten years getting this right so you do not have to

We know what it feels like to know your site’s accessibility could be better and not know how to fix it. We know how hard it is to get the map owner, the GIS lead, and procurement to all agree on the same path. We know that “make the map accessible” is the line item nobody on your team wants to own, because every previous attempt has produced a separate “accessible version” that fell out of date the next time the layer was edited.

Audiom was built by and for blind people. The founder, Brandon Biggs, is a PhD candidate at Georgia Tech researching accessible digital maps. We have run 13 academic studies and co-designs across 150 blind and 40 sighted participants showing efficacy. Audiom is ADA Title II, Section 508 (Opens an external website), Section 504 (Opens an external website), EAA (Opens an external website), and WCAG AAA conformant per a third-party Accessibility Conformance Report by Level Access. XR Navigation is an Esri Startup partner (Opens an external website) and a 2026 Esri Partner Conference Award winner.

Three steps to a compliant map

Send us a published ArcGIS feature layer for one pilot map. Tell us your population and whether the maps serve your department or your whole agency.
Approve a pilot quote under the micro-purchase cap. We deliver the pilot map in Audiom and sit with you while disabled residents validate it. We can recruit the testers.
Approve the enterprise annual license. We implement the first 5 to 10 maps and train your team to publish every future map directly through the Audiom widget.

No parallel data pipeline. No duplicate authoring. No separate “accessible version” to keep in sync. Editors update the source layer once, and every audience gets the change at the same time.

Built for federal, state, and local procurement

Esri partner. Audiom is built to work with the same feature layers your GIS team already publishes. Audiom also has an ArcGIS Experience Builder widget that can be installed system-wide.
Sole-source eligible. Audiom is the only ADA-compliant, WCAG AA conformant interactive map widget for ArcGIS. Government buyers can use the published sole-source justification when no comparable product exists on schedule.
Thematic and referential. Use Audiom for data-analytics maps (hazard, demographic, geological, election, disease, climate) and for navigation maps (campuses, multistory hospitals or airports, transit stations, polling places). Same widget, same layers.
Deployable on agency infrastructure. Audiom runs in the browser on the same page as your existing map. No new login, no redirect to a third-party host, no PII collected by the widget.
Tested with the population it serves. Every release is validated by disabled users on screen readers, screen magnifiers, keyboard-only setups, and braille displays.

Proof: Wisconsin Geological and Natural History Survey

The Wisconsin Geological and Natural History Survey, a state agency at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is the first Esri customer to publish a fully accessible ArcGIS map of state-level geological data. The Audiom version of their Quaternary Geology of Wisconsin map is now usable by blind, low-vision, colorblind, mobility-impaired, low-literacy, and cognitively diverse researchers, students, and members of the public on the same URL the agency already advertised.

Read the Wisconsin Geological Survey case study.

What your agency looks like with Audiom installed

Your next WCAG audit closes the map item on the first pass. Your office’s name shows up in the case study other agencies read when they are scoping their own pilot. The blind constituent who emailed you last year writes back to say the polling-place map worked. You stop being the person who has to apologize for the maps and become the person other departments call before they publish a new one. Your agency is one of the first in the country to clear the April 2027 deadline cleanly, on the maps auditors look at first.

Start the process

Most agencies are one widget install away from clearing a long-standing accessibility failure on their public maps. We will scope the integration, sit in on the procurement conversation, and deliver a working pilot on one of your existing maps. Then you will get one license to cover every map your agency publishes.