How Much Does an Accessibility Audit Cost?
Quotes for an accessibility audit range from nothing to five figures, which is confusing until you realise they are not the same product. Here is what each band buys and how to work out which one you need.
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The three bands, and what separates them
Automated audit: free to about 50 EUR. Software loads your pages and tests them against the rules a machine can verify: missing alt attributes, contrast ratios, unlabelled form fields, invalid ARIA, heading structure. It is fast, repeatable and bounded. It detects roughly 30 to 40 percent of WCAG issues and cannot judge meaning.
Manual expert audit: roughly 3,000 to 25,000 EUR. A specialist works through your flows with a screen reader and a keyboard and judges the things software cannot: whether alt text describes the right thing, whether focus order matches the visual order, whether an error message tells you how to recover. This is what produces a defensible conformance claim, and what a formal requirement eventually demands.
Agency retainer: a few hundred a month. Ongoing testing plus help doing the remediation. Sensible once you know the size of the problem, expensive as a way of finding out.
Which one your situation needs
Work backwards from who is asking.
- Nobody has asked yet, you want to know where you stand. Automated. Spending thousands to discover you have eleven fixable issues is a bad trade.
- A client or procurement form is asking. Usually an automated report plus visible remediation is enough at first, because what they are checking is that you take it seriously and have a plan. Read the actual question before buying anything: some ask for a conformance statement, which is a different document.
- A complaint or a legal letter has arrived. Manual, and a lawyer. Do not economise here.
- You are about to spend money on remediation. Automated first, always. It tells you the size and shape of the job, which is what any quote you receive should be based on.
Why the cheap end is worth doing first
The machine-checkable failures are not the trivial ones. Missing alt text, unlabelled buttons and low contrast are among the most common reasons a person cannot use a website, and they make up the bulk of most sites' issue lists. Fixing them is usually a small number of component changes.
Doing that first means a manual auditor spends their time on the questions only a person can answer, rather than writing up things a machine would have found for a fraction of the cost. It makes the expensive audit cheaper and more useful.
Our full site audit is 19 EUR, one payment: up to 20 pages against WCAG 2.1 AA, every issue with a written fix, delivered as a dated PDF. There is a sample report you can read first, and a free single page scan if you would rather see the format before spending anything.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why do accessibility audit prices vary so much?
Because they are different products. An automated audit is software time; a manual audit is expert hours. The price gap reflects the hours, and the hours reflect that judging whether alt text is meaningful cannot be automated.
Is a free accessibility checker good enough?
For finding out roughly where you stand, yes, and you should use one before paying anyone. What free tools generally do not give you is coverage of more than one page and a document you can send to someone.
What does an accessibility audit not cover?
An automated one cannot judge meaning: whether alt text describes the right thing, whether the reading order makes sense, whether a video's captions are accurate, whether an error message helps. It also cannot test flows that need a login or a real payment.
Do I need to repeat the audit?
After remediation, so you have evidence the fixes landed. After that it depends on how often your site changes. A shop that redesigns its product template has effectively changed every product page.
Need the whole site, not one page?
Full site audit as a PDF report — €19, one payment
Up to 20 pages tested against WCAG 2.1 AA, every issue with a written fix, emailed in minutes. No account, no subscription.
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