How much does an accessibility audit cost?

Why audit prices vary so much

You will see prices anywhere from a free automated scan to five-figure sums from large agencies. The gap comes down to what is actually being done:

• Automated scans run a tool such as WAVE or axe against your pages in seconds. They catch missing alt text and some colour-contrast problems, but they cannot tell you whether a form makes sense to a screen reader or whether a menu traps keyboard focus. Automated tools find roughly a third of WCAG issues; the rest need a person.
• Manual audits have a person testing with a keyboard, a screen reader and colour-contrast tools, page by page. This is slower and costs more, but it is what finds the barriers that actually stop someone completing a booking or a purchase.
• Page layouts, not page count. A 10-page brochure site might only use three layouts: home, a standard page and contact. A 10-page shop uses far more: category, product, basket, checkout and account pages, plus a multi-step purchase journey. That is what drives the time an audit takes.
• Reporting format adds time too. A formal conformance report in the VPAT/ACR format that procurement teams expect takes longer to prepare than a findings workbook.

The free 5-issue quick check

A no-cost first look. I check your site and send you five of the most important barriers I find, in plain English, so you can see whether a fuller audit is worth it. It is not an audit and does not cover the whole site, but it is an honest starting point.

Essentials, from £750

For brochure sites and small businesses that want to know where they stand and what to fix first, without paying for a full audit.

What it typically covers:

• Up to 4 page layouts, such as your homepage, a standard page and your contact page, plus one key task like sending an enquiry.
• Manual testing on desktop and mobile: keyboard access, screen reader, colour contrast, forms and how the page copes with zoom.
• A plain-English report with a prioritised fix list your developer can work from.

What it is not: a full check against every WCAG criterion, and not a VPAT or ACR. If you upgrade to a full audit within 30 days, the Essentials fee is credited in full.

Full audit, from £1,950

The audit to commission if you need evidence you can hand to developers, procurement or legal, or if accessibility genuinely matters to your business, whether that is because disabled customers are a meaningful part of your market, you are bidding for public sector work, or you want a defensible, dated record of what you tested.

What it typically covers:

• Up to 10 page layouts and your key user journeys: navigation, forms, search, booking, and interactive components such as menus, pop-ups and carousels.
• Testing against WCAG 2.2 at Level AA on desktop and mobile, using a keyboard, a screen reader and contrast tools, with automated tools as a first pass rather than the whole method.
• Findings delivered as a structured Excel workbook: a plain-English summary for the business owner, a detailed issue log for your developer with the exact fix for each problem, and a record of what was tested and passed.
• Every issue rated Fail or Advisory and ranked Critical, High, Medium or Low, so your developers know what to fix first.

For a typical small-to-medium business site, expect this to take one to two weeks from kick-off to report.

E-commerce and complex sites, from £3,500

Online shops and larger sites take considerably longer to test properly, because the most important journey, buying something, runs across several pages and often several plugins.

On top of the full audit, this covers:

• The complete purchase journey: product pages, basket, checkout fields, delivery date and time pickers, error messages and the payment step.
• Plugins and third-party components, such as cookie banners, form builders and booking tools, tested where they appear on your site.
• Video and media content.

Allow two to three weeks from kick-off to report, depending on the size of the catalogue and how many journeys there are.

The £150 to £250 retest

Once your developers have worked through the findings, a retest checks that the fixes actually work, rather than just having been applied. This is a shorter, targeted pass over the specific issues raised in the original audit, not a fresh audit. Your workbook is updated to show what is resolved, giving you a dated record that the barriers were addressed.

Need a VPAT or ACR?

If you are responding to a tender or a procurement team has asked for a conformance report, I can also produce a VPAT (International edition) completed to give you an ACR, covering WCAG, EN 301 549 and Section 508 in one document. This is an add-on to a full or e-commerce audit and is quoted separately.

Which one do you need?

As a rough guide: start with the free quick check if you have never looked at accessibility before. Choose Essentials if you have a simple site and want a clear fix list on a budget. Choose the full audit if you need evidence for procurement or legal purposes, or your site takes bookings or enquiries that matter to the business. Choose the e-commerce audit if people buy from your site.

Either way, the audit itself is only the diagnosis. Clearsight Access delivers findings and reports; fixing the code is down to your own developers, or whoever built the site.

Common questions