Cost of WCAG 2.1 AA Website Accessibility Audit

You can expect a range of $3,500 to $15,000 when asking for estimates on a WCAG 2.1 AA website accessibility audit. There are a number of factors that influence the price quote including scope, state of accessibility, provider, and more.
Note that audits are always manual evaluations of a website - even if an automated scan is sued, the results from that scan are always manually reviewed and never copied and pasted.
Accessible.org offers the ADA Compliance Program which includes an audit and code remediation. You can find more about audit and remediation services at accessible.org.
#AccessibilityAudit #ADAComplianceAudit #ADAWebsiteCompliance
Do you have a question about ADA compliance for websites? Do you have a success story to share? Join our Reddit community at / adabook .
Kris designed the ADA Compliance Program as a done-for-you (DFY) service for website owners. The ADA Compliance Program audits and remediates your website for $4,999 (for most websites). Find out more at ⁠accessible.org⁠.
Kris designed the ADA Compliance Course (ACC) as instructions you can give your team to fix the most commonly claimed issues in ADA website lawsuits.
The ACC is really an SOP for your web team. Your team can get started in minutes at ⁠ADACompliance.net⁠.
Would you like to learn the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines? With Kris's WCAG Course, you can learn WCAG in three hours. There's a lesson with a plain English video explanation for every success criterion in WCAG 2.0 AA, 2.1 AA, and 2.2 AA.
Sign up for Kris's WCAG Course at WCAGCourse.com.
Kris created Audits 101 so that you can learn how to audit a website against the WCAG 2.1 AA technical standards. Learn how to conduct an accessibility audit at ⁠Audits101.com⁠.
Connect with Kris directly on LinkedIn:
⁠ / adabook⁠
⁠ / krisrivenburgh⁠
Kris offers accessibility services including WCAG 2.1 AA manual audits and remediation at ⁠accessible.org⁠.
Kris also wrote the book on ADA compliance for digital assets. You can find out more about The ADA Book at ⁠ADABook.com⁠.

[@QuantumLegal]

I cant imagine anyone reasonably paying $3500 let alone $15,000. We had vendors try that with PDFs too - we just developed in-house expertise and continue to learn instead.

[@adabook]

The best route is always training so you can take accessibility in-house. If you can make accessibility a part of your process, your content, documents, etc. will already be accessible. Thanks for commenting.

[@QuantumLegal]

@@adabook I agree entirely, that is pretty much what we did and most of that learning has been predominantly organic - most course offerings just aren't advanced enough on the PDF remediation side of it (likely manually tagging and troubleshooting).

[@adabook]

@@QuantumLegal Have you seen @TheAccessibilityGuy channel? He has amazing tutorials on PDF remediation.

[@jgfeller]

Considering a website accessibility audit means testing for use every type of accessibility aid, accounting for physical, visual, auditory, and spectrum/mental sensitivities and issues, and testing the full range of WCAG standards, these numbers are actually super reasonable. It takes a lot of time to test this stuff. Of course you then have to pay to fix the problems, and get re-assessed after. Accessibility compliance isn't cheap because it requires a high level of training and expertise. If you have the funds to train your in-house people, that's cool (and PDFs are a lot different than web). If a company cares though, they'll pay it and be happy to. As more and more places bring web accessibility into law, this industry is going to become huge. It's a shame though, that it can't be done easily and with little expense, as this just increases the barriers to access for the disabled due to budgeting.

[@adabook]

​@@jgfellerI completely agree - if you aren't familiar with everything that goes into accessibility services they can seem pricey, but once you learn more about how in-depth good services go and how impactful they are, the prices for many genuine service providers are very fair.
And as you said, training takes time (and you have to care) so I always recommend outsourcing services to begin with to make digital assets conformant ASAP and then training concurrently so teams familiarize themselves with accessibility and can start integrating into processes. This is where accessibility becomes much, much easier because it's a part of the process rather than work that takes place after a website is built, etc.
Thanks so much for your insight.