What Does Making a Website Accessible Cost?

Audit first: what it costs

An audit tests the site against the success criteria in WCAG, the standard that European rules point to. A useful audit combines automated scanning, which finds the easy issues quickly, with manual testing using a keyboard and a screen reader, which finds the ones that actually block people. The price depends on how many distinct templates and flows are tested, not on the total number of pages: a site with thousands of product pages built on one template has one product template to test.

Design and code fixes

Design fixes cover colours with too little contrast, focus states that are invisible, tap targets that are too small and information conveyed by colour alone. Code fixes cover missing labels on form fields, buttons that are not real buttons, images without text alternatives, menus that cannot be used with a keyboard and dynamic content that screen readers do not announce. The key cost insight is that both sit mostly in shared components. Fix the button, the form field and the menu once, and every page improves.

• Colour and contrast: often a palette adjustment, cheap if colours are defined centrally.
• Keyboard and focus: usually component-level fixes in navigation, modals and custom controls.
• Forms: labels, error messages and instructions tied to fields, fixed once in the form component.
• Custom widgets: carousels, filters and date pickers are the most expensive; sometimes replacing them is cheaper than fixing them.
• Third-party parts such as chat widgets, booking tools and payment forms: you depend on the vendor, so check their accessibility before buying.

Content, PDFs and documents

Content is the part budgets forget. Headings used for styling rather than structure, link texts that just say read more, images without meaningful alternative text, videos without captions and PDFs scanned as images all fail users, and all must be fixed by whoever maintains the content. PDFs are the most expensive: making an existing PDF accessible is slow manual work, and often it is cheaper to turn the content into a web page.

Retrofitting vs building in

Accessibility built into a design system and development process adds modest cost to each component, because the right choice is made once. Retrofitting means finding each problem, redesigning, recoding and retesting components that were already paid for once. If your site is due for a redesign anyway, fold the accessibility requirements into the brief rather than fixing the old site first. Our guide to designing for WCAG 2.2 explains what to require.

1. Put WCAG 2.1 level AA, or 2.2 if you want to be ahead, in the requirements and the contract.
2. Require accessibility checks as part of acceptance testing, with keyboard and screen reader tests.
3. Choose third-party tools that document their accessibility.
4. Ask the supplier how accessibility is handled in their component library.

Ongoing checks

A site that is accessible at launch drifts: new content, new campaigns and new features each introduce issues. Budget for automated monitoring, a short manual check of new templates before release, and a yearly review. Whether the law applies to you depends on your size and what you sell; our guide to accessibility law for company websites covers the scope, including the exemption for the smallest service businesses.

When not to buy remediation from us: if a redesign is planned within a year, spend on building it in rather than fixing the old site, unless the law or real users need it sooner. Our UX audit and conversion service includes an accessibility review with a prioritised fix list; see pricing or book a call and we will scope an audit to your templates.

Frequently asked questions