Accessibility Audit Report — What It Contains and What It Costs

People rarely commission an audit out of curiosity. They commission one because somebody asked. A procurement form has a WCAG question on it. A client wants evidence before signing. A complaint arrived. A lawyer said the words European Accessibility Act and nobody in the room knew the answer.

In all of those situations the deliverable is a document with a date on it, listing what was tested, what was found and what to do about it. A live dashboard does not serve that purpose. Neither does a browser extension that shows a score and forgets it. The report is the artefact.

The second purpose is internal: handing a developer something they can work from. A list of rule names is not that. A list of rule names, the exact elements that broke them, the pages they appear on and a corrected snippet for each is.

A report worth its price answers five questions without you having to ask them:

• What was tested. Which pages, on which date, against which standard. "Your website" is not a scope; a list of twenty URLs is.
• What was found, grouped by cause. The same missing label repeated across twenty pages is one problem, not twenty. Grouping by rule rather than by page is the difference between a fix list and a spreadsheet.
• Where each issue actually appears. The element markup and the pages affected, so nobody has to hunt.
• What to do about each one. In words a developer can act on, with corrected markup where the fix is markup.
• What the testing could not tell you. Any report that omits this is overselling.

The market splits into three bands, and they are not really competing with each other:

• Manual expert audits, roughly 3,000 to 25,000 EUR. A specialist tests with screen readers and keyboard navigation, judges whether alt text is meaningful, and writes findings by hand. This is the only thing that produces a defensible claim of conformance. If you are subject to a formal requirement, this is what you eventually need.
• Agency retainers, several hundred a month. Ongoing monitoring plus remediation help.
• Automated audits, free to a few tens of euros. A machine tests every page against the machine-checkable rules and reports what it finds. Fast, cheap, and bounded: it reliably detects roughly 30 to 40 percent of WCAG issues.

The honest use of the third band is as the first step, not the last one. It finds the concrete failures quickly, which is usually most of the actual work, and it tells you whether you are looking at a tidy site with a handful of problems or a rebuild. Spending 3,000 EUR to discover the first is a waste; discovering it for 19 is not.

Scan a single page free on this site to see the format. If it looks useful, the full audit crawls up to 20 pages of your site, tests each against WCAG 2.1 Level AA, groups every finding by rule with a written fix, and emails you a dated PDF. 19 EUR, once, no account and no subscription. If we cannot load your pages, you are refunded automatically.

You can read a complete sample report before deciding, produced by the same pipeline against the W3C's own published example of an inaccessible website.