What Accessibility Remediation Actually Costs

Nobody publishes accessibility pricing, and the reason is not mysterious: the honest answer is a range so wide it looks evasive. Two sites with the same page count can differ by a factor of ten, and the factor is almost never page count.

So instead of a number, here is the thing that is actually useful — what drives the number, why the quotes you are holding disagree so violently, and how to tell which one is lying.

Why the same site gets quotes 10x apart

Because the firms are quoting different work and calling it the same thing.

A quote can mean "we will run a scanner and hand you the output." It can mean "we will audit properly and give you a findings list." It can mean "we will audit and fix it." It can mean "we will audit, fix it, fix the design system so it stays fixed, train your team, and rewrite your procurement language." These are wildly different engagements with identical two-word names.

The second reason is honesty about scope. A firm quoting on the main website is cheaper than a firm quoting on the main website plus the booking engine, the PDF library, the careers portal and the mobile app — and the second firm is the one telling you the truth about what a regulator or a plaintiff would consider in scope.

The third reason is that some firms are quoting a product sale and calling it remediation. More on that below.

What actually drives the cost

Not page count. These, roughly in order of impact:

How the site was built. This dominates everything else. A site on a component library or design system, where a button is one button used in four hundred places, can be largely remediated by fixing a few dozen components. A site accreted over a decade — three CMSs, a rebrand that was applied by find-and-replace, a section nobody has deployment access to — has no leverage points. The same findings list costs five times as much to clear.

How much of it you control. Third-party components are the single biggest source of schedule risk. If your permit portal, donation flow, scheduling widget or LMS is inaccessible and the vendor is unresponsive, your options are pressure, contract leverage at renewal, replacement, or an accommodation path while the gap remains. None are quick and one is a procurement project.

Documents. A thousand untagged PDFs is a bigger line item than the entire website for many public bodies. Remediating a complex PDF properly — tagged structure, reading order, alt text, table headers — is measured in hours per document, not minutes. The honest strategies here are converting to HTML, regenerating from source correctly, prioritising by what people actually download, and retiring what nobody needs. Anyone quoting a flat per-page rate for PDF remediation across a heterogeneous library has not looked at your library.

Whether anyone in-house can do the work. A team with a competent front-end developer who can take a findings list and act on it changes the economics completely. The expensive version is when the remediating firm also has to be the implementing firm on a codebase they are learning.

Media. Captions, transcripts and audio description for an existing video archive is its own project with its own budget. Auto-captions are a first draft, not a deliverable — a human pass to fix names, numbers and terminology is the actual cost.

The shape of the number

Without pretending to quote your site, here is how the work usually divides:

The audit is the cheapest phase and the one most often skipped, which is backwards. Remediating without it means fixing what is visible rather than what is failing, and you find out which at the end.

What a cheap quote is hiding

Not always a scam — sometimes just a narrower scope honestly described. But these three patterns are worth recognising:

It is a scanner subscription. Automated tooling can evaluate a minority of WCAG success criteria. A product that scans your site monthly and emails a dashboard is a useful monitoring tool and is not remediation. If the deliverable is a recurring report, you are buying monitoring.

It is an overlay. Overlay and widget products are sold at a price that looks like a bargain against a remediation programme because they are not a remediation programme. They do not produce conformance, they are rejected by much of the disability community, and they have been cited in accessibility litigation. We have written on why they don't work. A cheap quote that resolves to a script tag is the most expensive option on the table, because you will pay it and then pay for the real work.

It is an audit priced as a remediation. Read what the deliverable is. "We will make your site WCAG 2.1 AA compliant" and "we will deliver a report of WCAG 2.1 AA conformance issues" are separated by the entire cost of the project.

The tell for all three: ask what happens if a user still cannot complete a task after the engagement. A real remediation proposal has an answer. A product sale changes the subject.

What an expensive quote should include

If you are paying at the top of the range, these should be in the scope, in writing:

• An inventory before the audit. Every public-facing property, ranked by user impact. Most organizations discover more properties than they expected, and discovering them in month six is what breaks budgets.
• Manual and assistive-technology testing, not only automated scanning, with the split stated explicitly.
• Findings written for developers. A finding that says "1.3.1 Info and Relationships" is a citation. A finding that says which element, on which template, what is wrong, and what correct looks like is a work ticket. You are paying for the second.
• Fixes at the component level, so conformance is inherited rather than repeated page by page.
• Retesting after remediation, by the people who found the issues.
• Something that outlives the engagement — acceptance criteria in your definition of done, procurement language, and training for whoever publishes content. Without this you are buying a snapshot, and content drifts back within a year.

The cheapest time to do this

During a redesign. By a wide margin, and it is not close.

Accessibility built into a design system during a rebuild costs a fraction of retrofitting the same requirements afterwards, because you are making decisions once rather than unpicking them across a live site. Colour contrast is a palette decision. Focus indicators are a component decision. Heading structure is a template decision. Made at the right moment each is free; made eighteen months later each is a project.

The second cheapest time is now, on your own schedule. The most expensive is after a demand letter arrives, when the timeline is written by someone else's lawyer and the leverage is entirely theirs.

How to get a number you can trust

Ask any firm — including us — for these four things before you compare prices:

1. What exactly will you test, and how? Which pages, which flows, which assistive technology, which criteria. A vendor unwilling to publish their method is worth a second look. Ours is published in full.
2. What is explicitly out of scope? Vendor portals, PDFs, video, mobile apps, anything behind a login. The gaps are where the budget surprises live.
3. What do I get, and who can act on it? A report, or a report plus fixes? If fixes, by whom — you, us, our subcontractor?
4. Does your own site pass? Fair question to ask an accessibility vendor, and a surprising number cannot answer it well. Ours is imperfect and we publish what is wrong with it.

Then get a real baseline before you commit to anything. You can start the same afternoon with the free checker — it is ungated and nothing leaves your browser — or by spending fifteen minutes doing the keyboard test. Neither replaces an audit. Both will tell you whether the quotes you are holding are describing the same website you have.