Search for the cost to make a website accessible and you’ll find price guides that disagree by thousands. One guide’s range for a typical business website can be several times another’s, and few of them show where their numbers come from.
The honest answer is that nobody can price your website without looking at it. But the cost isn’t a mystery either. It’s made up of a handful of parts, and you can check most of them yourself before you spend anything. This guide walks through what you’re actually paying for, what you can do on your own, and how to find out what your own site needs.
The short answer: it depends on four things
The cost of making a website accessible depends on four factors:
- How many issues your site has right now, and how serious they are.
- How your site is built. An issue in a shared template, like your header, menu, footer or product card, shows up on every page but only needs to be addressed once.
- Who does the work: you, your own developer, or an outside accessibility specialist.
- Whether you keep it accessible afterwards, or treat it as a one-off project while your content and code keep changing.
A website with a few dozen issues, mostly in its templates and content, sits at the low end. A site with custom-built components, complex forms and years of inconsistent content sits at the high end. Most websites land somewhere in between, and the first step is finding out where yours is.
What you’re actually paying for
Accessibility work breaks down into four parts. Some cost very little. One of them is where most of the money goes.
Finding the issues
An automated accessibility scan checks your pages for common problems: images without alt text, text with too little color contrast, form fields without labels, and links or buttons with no readable name. This is the cheapest part of the process. Free tools exist, and many accessibility monitoring tools have a free tier.
Automated checks have a limit, though. They catch a share of the issues covered by WCAG (the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines most accessibility laws refer to), not all of them. Whether a page works well with a screen reader, or whether an error message actually helps someone fix their input, still needs a person to judge.
Scanluma’s Free plan is one way to start here. You add your website, Scanluma scans your homepage every week, and each report shows the exact element behind every issue with a plain-language explanation of what’s wrong.
Manual review and expert audits
A manual review covers what automated checks can’t. A tester navigates your site with only a keyboard, uses a screen reader, checks the focus order, and looks at whether forms, menus and pop-ups behave the way assistive technology expects.
This is where most of the professional cost sits. Auditors usually price by the hour or by scope: how many pages and templates, how many interactive features, and whether they test on mobile as well. A website accessibility audit of a site built on a few templates is a very different job from one covering a custom web app.
Making the changes
Once you know what’s wrong, someone has to change it. For code issues, that’s developer time. For content issues, it’s often you.
The way your site is built makes a big difference here. Say your site-wide button style has text with too little contrast. That might show up as 200 issues in a scan, one per page. In practice, it’s a single change to one style. Sites that run on a CMS with shared templates often turn out cheaper to improve than their page count suggests, because one template change carries through to every page that uses it.
The expensive cases are the opposite: custom components built without accessibility in mind, like a homemade dropdown menu, a slider or a modal window that traps keyboard users. Those often need part of the component rebuilt, not just adjusted.
Keeping it accessible
Websites don’t stand still. New pages, new products, plugin updates and theme changes all bring new issues. A site that was in good shape in spring can drift by autumn without anyone noticing.
That’s why ongoing accessibility monitoring is its own line in the budget. It usually costs much less than the first round of work, and it keeps you from paying for the same clean-up twice.
What you can do yourself (and what you can’t)
A good share of accessibility work doesn’t need a developer. If you can edit pages in your CMS, you can probably handle these yourself:
- Writing alt text for images
- Making link text descriptive (“Download the price list” instead of “Click here”)
- Using headings in a logical order (one H1, then H2s and H3s underneath)
- Adding captions to your own videos
- Picking colors with enough contrast when you change your theme or brand colors
- Checking your site with only a keyboard: can you reach every link, menu and button with Tab?
The WCAG compliance checklist lists these checks in plain language, level by level.
Some work usually needs a developer:
- Custom components like menus, sliders, tabs and modal windows
- Form error handling and messages that screen readers announce
- Focus management (where keyboard focus goes after a pop-up opens or closes)
- Contrast and spacing problems built into the theme’s code
If you’re a freelancer or agency quoting this work for a client, splitting it this way helps. The client can see which part they can take on themselves, which part is your time, and why the quote looks the way it does.
Why building it in early costs less
The cheapest moment to add accessibility is when you’re already changing the site. The W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative notes that a Forrester study commissioned by Microsoft “concluded that accessibility could contribute to cost savings when it is integrated into existing and ongoing development cycles.”
In practical terms: if you’re planning a redesign, switching themes or rebuilding your shop, put accessibility in the requirements now. Ask your developer or agency to build to WCAG 2.2 Level AA from the start. Choosing an accessible theme or component library costs little extra on day one. Retrofitting the same thing a year later means paying someone to open up work that was already paid for.
What does doing nothing cost?
Skipping accessibility isn’t free either. In the US, law firm Seyfarth Shaw counted 3,117 federal lawsuits about website accessibility in 2025. In the EU, the European Accessibility Act has applied to many consumer-facing websites and online services since June 2025, with penalties set by each member state.
Legal risk is only part of the picture, though. Visitors who can’t read your text, can’t use your menu or can’t complete a form simply leave. That’s lost business you never see in a report. The business case for an accessible website covers the other side of the ledger: what you gain when more people can actually use your site.
How to find out what your website needs
You can’t price what you haven’t measured. Here’s a practical way to get from “it depends” to a real number for your own site.
1. See how many issues there are, and where. Run a scan first. The number of issues matters, but where they sit matters more. If most of them come from a few elements repeated across every page, you’re looking at a handful of template changes. If they’re spread across many different elements, expect more work.
2. Handle the content issues yourself. Alt text, link text and headings are usually quick wins. Clearing them first means you don’t pay someone else for work you can do in your CMS.
3. Get a quote for the rest, with the scan report in hand. A developer can quote far more accurately when they can see the exact elements affected than when they’re asked to “make the site accessible.” It also makes quotes from different developers easier to compare.
4. Keep monitoring. Once the big issues are addressed, regular scans catch new problems before they pile up again.
Scanluma covers steps 1 and 4. It shows the exact element behind every issue, explains in plain language what needs to change, and keeps checking your site on a schedule. It doesn’t make the changes for you. You or your developer stay in control of the code. If you run a small business and want to see how this fits your situation, the small business page explains it in more detail.
Frequently asked questions
It depends on how many issues your site has, how they’re spread across its templates, who addresses them and whether you keep monitoring afterwards. A scan of your site is the quickest way to move from a general range to an estimate for your own website.
Partly. Free tools and free monitoring plans find many common issues, and much of the content work, like alt text, link text and headings, can be done in your CMS at no cost. Custom code, complex forms and manual testing with a screen reader usually need paid time from a developer or specialist.
Overlay widgets add a toolbar or script to your site but don’t change the underlying code, so the issues are still there. Many accessibility specialists criticise them, and they’re no substitute for addressing the issues themselves. The money usually goes further when it’s spent on the real changes.
With Scanluma, you can start free: the Free plan monitors your homepage every week. The Pro plan costs €29.95 per month (excl. VAT) and adds daily or weekly scans of your homepage plus up to 10 subpages, mobile device scans, email notifications and a PDF report per scan.
Once you know what’s actually on your site, the cost stops being a guess. Add your website to Scanluma for free, see where your issues are and what they involve, and take that report to whoever does the work.
