How Much Does Website Accessibility Cost? A Realistic Breakdown

# How Much Does Website Accessibility Cost? A Realistic Breakdown

If you run a business with a website, you have probably asked yourself how much it would cost to make that website accessible. It is a fair question, and one that rarely gets a straight answer. Some vendors quote hundreds of dollars, others quote tens of thousands, and the ranges online feel almost meaningless without context.

The truth is that website accessibility cost depends on your site's size, technical complexity, current accessibility state, and whether you are building from scratch or retrofitting. There is no universal price tag, but there are realistic ranges you can use to plan and budget.

This article breaks down every major cost category Eautomated scanning tools, manual audits, developer remediation, and ongoing monitoring Eso you can evaluate the investment with clear expectations. Just as importantly, it examines the cost of doing nothing, which for many businesses turns out to be the most expensive option of all.

Why There Is No Single Answer to the Cost Question

Every website is different. A five-page brochure site built on a clean template requires a fraction of the work that a 500-page e-commerce platform with custom interactive components and years of accumulated content needs.

The major variables that influence website accessibility cost include:

Site size. A 10-page site and a 1,000-page site are fundamentally different projects in terms of content to evaluate and issues to fix.
Technical complexity. Static informational pages are simpler to make accessible than dynamic applications with custom widgets, modal dialogs, multi-step forms, and real-time content updates.
Current accessibility state. A site built with some accessibility awareness may need moderate adjustments. A site built with none Ewhich describes the majority of websites Ewill require substantially more work.
Content volume. Thousands of images without alt text, hundreds of untagged PDFs, and years of blog posts with broken heading structures all add to scope.
Third-party components. Inaccessible chat widgets, booking engines, or payment forms may require vendor coordination or full component replacement.

Understanding these variables helps you evaluate any quote and avoid both undersized solutions and overengineered engagements.

Cost of Automated Scanning Tools

Automated scanning tools are the most affordable entry point. They crawl your website, test pages against WCAG 2.1 criteria, and generate reports identifying issues they can detect programmatically. They are fast, scalable, and essential as a first step Ethough they have important limitations.

Free tools

Several free tools exist that can scan individual pages and flag common issues. Browser extensions like WAVE and axe DevTools let you test one page at a time at no cost. These are valuable for spot checks and developer workflows, but they do not provide site-wide coverage, historical tracking, or ongoing monitoring.

A11yScope's free scanner falls into this category as well, letting you run an initial scan to understand your current accessibility state before committing to any investment. If you have never tested your site for accessibility, starting with a free scan is the most practical first step you can take.

Paid scanning platforms

Paid scanning platforms typically range from $30 to $300 per month for small-to-midsize businesses, depending on page volume, scan frequency, and reporting depth. At the lower end, you get basic periodic scanning. At the higher end, you get continuous monitoring, detailed remediation guidance, trend tracking, and multi-site management.

A11yScope's Pro plan sits at $49 per month Ethorough automated scanning with clear, actionable reporting, without the enterprise-level pricing that many platforms charge. For most small and midsize businesses, this tier covers the automated scanning portion of an accessibility program effectively.

Enterprise platforms

Large organizations may invest in enterprise scanning platforms costing $5,000 to $30,000 or more per year, with features like API integrations, governance workflows, and dedicated account management. For the typical small or midsize business, these are unnecessary.

What automated tools cannot do

Automated scanners, regardless of price, can only detect roughly 30 to 50 percent of WCAG issues. They catch structural problems Emissing alt text, insufficient contrast, missing form labels Ebut they cannot evaluate whether alt text is meaningful, whether interactions are navigable by keyboard in practice, or whether reading order makes sense to a screen reader user. Automated scanning is necessary, but not sufficient on its own.

Cost of Manual Accessibility Audits

A manual accessibility audit involves a trained specialist testing your website using assistive technologies like screen readers, keyboard-only navigation, and magnification tools. Manual audits catch the issues that automated tools miss and are the gold standard for evaluating real-world usability.

Consultant rates

Accessibility consultants typically charge a flat project fee or an hourly rate. Hourly rates generally range from $100 to $250 per hour, depending on certifications, experience, and geographic market. Specialists with IAAP certifications (CPAC, WAS, or CPACC) tend to command the higher end of that range.

Typical audit pricing

For a small business website with 10 to 25 representative pages, a manual WCAG 2.1 AA audit typically costs between $3,000 and $10,000, including testing, documentation of findings mapped to WCAG criteria, severity ratings, and remediation recommendations.

For midsize websites with complex functionality Ee-commerce checkout flows, customer portals, interactive tools Eaudit costs range from $10,000 to $35,000 or more.

These are not trivial numbers, which is exactly why combining automated scanning with targeted manual review is the most cost-effective approach. Use an automated tool to resolve the issues machines can catch first, then invest in manual auditing for the issues that require human judgment Ereducing the scope and cost of the manual engagement significantly.

How often you need a manual audit

A full manual audit is not something you need to do every month. Most businesses benefit from a comprehensive manual audit once a year or whenever a major site redesign or platform migration occurs. Between audits, weekly monitoring with an automated scanning tool catches regressions and new issues introduced by content updates or code deployments.

Cost of Remediation: Developer Hours by Issue Type

Identifying accessibility issues is only half the equation. Fixing them requires developer time, and the cost of remediation varies enormously depending on what types of issues exist and how deeply they are embedded in your site's architecture.

Low-effort fixes

Many common accessibility issues are straightforward to resolve and can be handled relatively quickly by a competent developer:

Adding alt text to images Ea few minutes per image, though writing genuinely descriptive alt text at scale takes longer than most people expect.
Fixing color contrast Eupdating CSS color values to meet WCAG ratio requirements. Usually a matter of hours for a site-wide pass.
Adding form labels Eassociating labels with form inputs. A straightforward code change for each form.
Fixing heading hierarchy Erestructuring headings to follow a logical order. Typically quick unless baked into a CMS template.

These types of fixes often fall in the range of $500 to $3,000 total for a small site, depending on volume.

Medium-effort fixes

Some issues require more significant development work:

Keyboard navigation for interactive components Eensuring dropdowns, modals, tab panels, accordions, and carousels are fully operable with a keyboard. Each component may take several hours.
ARIA implementation Eadding or correcting ARIA roles, states, and properties so screen readers can interpret custom widgets correctly.
Accessible error handling Eensuring form validation errors are announced to screen readers, focus is managed correctly, and error messages are associated with the relevant fields.

Medium-effort remediation for a small-to-midsize site generally falls in the range of $3,000 to $10,000, depending on how many interactive components the site uses.

High-effort fixes

The most expensive remediation work involves architectural issues that cannot be resolved with surface-level code changes:

Replacing inaccessible third-party components Eif your site depends on a booking widget or chat tool that is fundamentally inaccessible, you may need to replace it entirely.
Retrofitting a CMS theme Eif accessibility problems are baked into your base theme, every page inherits those issues. Fixing the theme requires deeper development effort than patching individual pages.
Making PDF documents accessible Eremediating a large library of untagged PDFs is time-intensive. Each document needs tagging, reading order, and alt text. Complex documents can take hours each.
Video captioning and audio description Eadding accurate captions and audio descriptions to video content. Professional captioning services typically charge per minute of video.

High-effort remediation can range from $10,000 to $50,000 or more for sites with extensive interactive features, large content libraries, or deeply embedded architectural issues.

Total remediation cost estimates

Pulling these ranges together, a small business with a simple site might spend $2,000 to $10,000 on initial remediation. A midsize business with more complex functionality could spend $15,000 to $50,000. Larger sites can exceed these ranges significantly.

These numbers reinforce why proactive accessibility Ebuilding it in from the start Eis so much more economical. Developers who build with accessibility in mind add minimal overhead. Retrofitting the same features later costs many times more.

The Cost of NOT Being Accessible

For business owners weighing whether accessibility is worth the investment, the most important number to understand is not what compliance costs. It is what non-compliance costs.

Legal exposure

ADA website lawsuits have grown into one of the most active categories of civil litigation in the United States. Thousands of federal lawsuits are filed each year alleging that websites are inaccessible to people with disabilities, and the actual number of legal actions is much higher when you include state-level filings and pre-litigation demand letters.

Settlement amounts commonly range from several thousand dollars for a demand letter resolution to six figures or more for cases that proceed through litigation. Legal defense costs alone can run into the tens of thousands of dollars in attorney fees, even for cases that settle.

Critically, settling does not make the underlying problem go away. If your website remains inaccessible after a settlement, you can be sued again. Some businesses have faced repeat litigation precisely because they paid a settlement without remediating their sites.

Lost revenue

Over one billion people worldwide live with some form of disability. In the United States alone, adults with disabilities represent significant spending power. When your website is inaccessible, you are not just creating a compliance risk Eyou are actively turning away customers who want to do business with you but cannot navigate your site.

Accessibility barriers do not just affect screen reader users. They also create friction for older adults, people with temporary injuries, mobile users in challenging environments, and anyone using voice commands or alternative input methods. The revenue impact extends well beyond the disability community.

Reputational damage

Accessibility lawsuits are public record, and news coverage of failures can damage your brand far beyond the direct legal costs. Conversely, demonstrating genuine commitment to accessibility builds trust with customers, partners, and employees Emaking it both a compliance matter and a brand differentiator.

Compounding costs of delay

Accessibility debt compounds like technical debt. Every new page published without alt text, every feature shipped without keyboard support, and every PDF uploaded without tagging adds to the backlog. The longer you wait, the more expensive the fix becomes. Starting now is always cheaper than starting later.

The Most Cost-Effective Approach for Small and Midsize Businesses

The most practical accessibility strategy for small and midsize businesses follows a clear sequence.

Step 1: Scan first

Start by running an automated scan to understand your current state. You need a clear picture of how many issues exist and which pages are most affected before deciding where to invest.

A11yScope's free scanner gives you this baseline in minutes. You will see a prioritized list of issues mapped to WCAG criteria, with severity ratings that help you understand what needs attention first.

Step 2: Fix the critical issues

Address the highest-impact, highest-severity issues first. These are the problems that create the most significant barriers for users and represent the greatest legal risk. Many of the most common critical issues Emissing alt text, missing form labels, broken heading structure, and insufficient color contrast Eare also among the least expensive to fix.

For guidance on resolving the issues automated scanners find, see our guide on how to fix accessibility issues found by automated scanners.

Step 3: Set up ongoing monitoring

Accessibility is not a one-time project. Your website changes constantly, and without ongoing monitoring, fixed issues can reappear and new ones can be introduced without anyone noticing.

Weekly monitoring is the most efficient way to maintain your posture over time. The Pro plan at $49 per month gives you continuous scanning, trend tracking, and alerts when new issues appear Ea fraction of the cost of a single legal demand letter.

Step 4: Invest in manual auditing when it matters

Once you have addressed automated findings and established a monitoring baseline, you are in the strongest position to get value from a manual audit. The consultant can focus on nuanced, interaction-level issues rather than wasting expensive hours on problems an automated tool could have caught.

This phased approach lets you spread the investment over time, demonstrate good faith effort toward compliance, reduce legal risk at each step, and make the eventual manual audit more focused and less expensive.

Budgeting for Accessibility: A Practical Framework

For business owners who want concrete planning numbers, here is a realistic framework:

| Category | Estimated Cost Range | Frequency |

|---|---|---|

| Automated scanning tool | $0 E$100/month | Ongoing |

| Initial remediation (common issues) | $2,000 E$15,000 | One-time |

| Manual WCAG audit | $3,000 E$35,000 | Annually or at major redesign |

| Ongoing developer maintenance | $500 E$2,000/month | Ongoing |

| Content accessibility (alt text, captions) | $500 E$5,000 | As content is published |

A small business might invest $5,000 to $20,000 in the first year, with $5,000 to $15,000 annually to maintain compliance. Midsize businesses could spend $20,000 to $75,000 in year one, with ongoing costs scaling accordingly.

Compare these figures to a single legal action Ewhich can easily exceed your entire first-year accessibility investment Eand the economic case becomes clear.

Start With What You Can Control Today

You do not need to solve every accessibility issue at once. You do not need to hire a $30,000 consultant before you have even identified what is wrong with your site. What you need is a clear starting point.

Run a scan. See where you stand. Fix the critical issues. Set up monitoring so problems do not recur. Then invest in deeper testing when you are ready.

A11yScope's free scanner gives you that starting point at no cost. When you are ready for continuous monitoring and detailed remediation guidance, the Pro plan provides ongoing protection for $49 per month Eless than most businesses spend on a single software subscription.

The question is not whether you can afford website accessibility. Given the legal landscape, the revenue you are leaving on the table, and the compounding cost of delay, the real question is whether you can afford to keep putting it off.