$12,500 if I had to name one price for both an audit and remediation under WCAG 2.1 conformance level AA.
Now what goes into this price quote?
Well we first arere going to look at the type of digital asset.
In this case it’s a website so then we’re going to look at the complexity of the website.
Some websites are more complex, they take more time, they might need more difficult to audit and or remediate and other websites are fairly simple.
If your website is fairly simple, it’s going to cost less.
We’re also going to look at the number of pages and or screens that are within scope.
So unless your website is very limited in its pages, you’re going to cut off the pages that are going to be audited and/or remediated because it’s inefficient to audit every last page.
Let’s say Amazon came to me and they asked me for an audit.
I’m not going to tell them I’m going to audit every last page – It doesn’t make sense especially because most of those pages are duplicates of one another with just different content inside the layouts.
So it’s probably going to be the primary layouts I wouldn’t audit every last product page, I would just audit one product page and then it would be up to Amazon’s developers to apply those audits on a site wide scale.
So keep in mind it comes down to pages and/or screens.
So a page, think of a page as the URL, the page that resolves when we enter into a URL think of a screen as what could be a pop up whether it’s an e-mail capture, whether it’s some type of pop-up that results from a button being clicked.
A screen would be separate. There can be a page and there can be a screen on that page so keep that in mind.
And then the state of accessibility if-if a website is very inaccessible, there are a number of accessibility issues, it’s simply going to take longer to audit all of those issues and then to remediate them.
So you could have two websites that are very similar but have different costs associated with them because one it has so many more accessibility issues to go through than another.
So something else that’s going to affect the price and this is outside of the website itself is who you’re dealing with.
And are you dealing with them for everything or just the audit side or just the remediation side?
So are you dealing with the freelancer, a small business, a medium agency, a large company those are all going to affect your costs and they have trade-offs, right.
Freelancers are going to be cheaper but you’re going to incur more risk because if they don’t-if they do a bad job then there’s nothing really that happens from- they don’t have a reputation you’ll really want to research that freelancer but good freelancers can be had.
And I would look on Upwork or Freelancer, those are two different types of places where you can search for people who are accessibility developers and primarily they’re going to be looking for developers.
Also with freelancers, those developers are going to- they’re not going to take care of all of your accessibility considerations under remediation.
Nor would most entities and when I talk about that I’m saying, most everybody- most anybody that you hire is not going to overhaul your closed captions, right.
They’re going to tell you what you need to do but you’re going to be on our own for that.
Same with text transcripts and that’s just because it’s redundant you don’t need the specialized skill, you’d be paying them a premium to do something that you can pay a lot less for.
But what you would do is you would source that work to a company that specializes let’s say and closed captioning or transcripts creating transcripts or you could just do it in-house.
So there’s a freelancer, there’s the small business – I under that small business category, there’s an agency which is more like in the middle ground, and then there’s the large companies.
So when you think of large companies you think of Level Access, you think of the Paciello Group, you think of trying to think of, there’s another large company, it’s escaping my mind.
But you would look to those companies and that’s where- that’s where- those are going they’re going to cost more, but they have a reputation they’re more established- there is a lot less chance- they’re going to do a competent job that’s because they’re they’ve done this, they’ve been in this industry for years.
So there is assurance with them and but again another trade-off is that most of most of these entities that I named are not going to do both the audit and remediation.
They will do your audit, but they will not touch your code, they will not touch your content, they will leave you to that.
They will point out the issues, but then they will leave the actual resolution, the remediation to you.
So there are trade-offs there.
They are going to cost much more, the large companies are going to cost more.
Medium agencies, usually a little bit less.
Same with small businesses.
Freelancers are going to be the cheapest but you’re going to have the most risk.
But if you do find a good freelancer it is like getting a discount, maybe like a 50% discount so the prices really do tier down based on the size of the entity that you’re dealing with.
But what you really want to focus in on is that you get both services both the audit and remediation services done right the first time – that will save you money.
Because if you do go the cheap route then you can really lose because no matter who you hire, if someone’s doing a legitimate job you’re going to pay thousands of dollars, there’s no way around that.
You are going to have to at least pay a few thousand dollars for someone to audit and remediate your website.
And I’m- and that’s if you- it is very difficult there is a there’s an expense to just finding that person, it can be difficult to find that person.
Here’s the other thing with freelancers and small businesses especially on the freelancer type websites like Upwork and Freelancer is that you will have so many- so many of these freelancers, agencies, small businesses that will tell you they will do a good job or that they’ve they’re experienced or that they have experts and they do not.
So they will outright lie you and so it is a landmine of or a minefield of just trying to get around people who are saying they can do- they are familiar with accessibility that they are experts in accessibility and they really are not.
So you have to be aware of that aware of that as well.
But those are those are a lot of the considerations that go into the cost of website accessibility.
If you can get a solid price for an audit, probably around $3,500 to to $7,500, it just depends what your asset what state of your asset is in how large it is how complex it is if you can get within that price range of doing well.
I wouldn’t be looking for the cheapest solution, I recommend you look for a reputable solution and one you believe in that they will look out for your best interests and legitimately do a good job and legitimately care about the job they’re doing because you definitely want to avoid this twice- doing this twice or three times which happens because some people hire the wrong entity.
And two reasons why you would want to get someone who does both an audit and remediation are 1) they would likely issue a conformant statement for free – that’s going to act as a certification of sorts that your website is accessible as of a certain date and it will very likely cost less if you get more- if you get both the audit and remediation done by the same place.
Because if you hire one agency for an audit and another agency for remediation, you’re going to pay that up- you’re going to have that upfront cost of dealing with two separate entities and it’s going to separate and you’re going to pay more that’s just that’s just the way it works.
And then last never ever hire an overlay vendor for accessibility services.
So overlay vendors are the people that are selling you on the fact that they can embed a widget and they can- you can copy and paste code or upload some type of plugin and the results are- is accessibility options and or supposed accessibility options.
And that these supposedly take care of all of your accessibility.
Well now what we see is these overlay vendors are now offering services because inevitably what happens is people realize, hey this doesn’t actually do anything, I need manual work done.
But you don’t want to get your work done from them I would never trust them so whatever you do, if anybody has an easy to install widget or anything- a clickable icon that opens up into an array of accessibility options or there’s an accessibility menu of sorts, ignore that.
Focus in on the entities that insist upon manual remediation and manual audits because the manual side is the most important part of this and it’s why it there is such a significant upfront cost to website accessibility.
