Navigating the complexities of budgeting for digital accessibility can be daunting for many teams. Without a clear understanding of what is required or how to allocate resources effectively, organizations often struggle to implement or maintain strong digital accessibility practices.
This blog aims to demystify some of the unknowns around the cost of digital accessibility, providing detailed insights into why accessibility matters, how to build a task force, and what to expect when planning and budgeting for an accessibility project.
Why Accessibility Matters for Your Organization
The need to focus on digital accessibility is greater than ever due to growing global regulations that no longer allow organizations to view accessibility as a bonus feature.
Compliance with these regulations, such as the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), the European Accessibility Act, and sector-specific guidelines like Section 508 for federal agencies or HHS regulations for healthcare organizations in the United States, is essential to avoid legal repercussions and potential fines.
Beyond legal compliance, accessibility enhances your brand’s reputation, broadens your audience, and can significantly improve user experience for all visitors.
Compliance and Legal Considerations
Ignoring accessibility can result in significant legal ramifications. For instance, in 2023 alone, over 4,000 ADA-related digital accessibility lawsuits were filed in the United States. This number doesn’t even account for the thousands of demand letters for non-compliance that were filed as well, but in most scenarios, they have the same resource outcome for businesses.
Many organizations overlook a critical factor until faced with legal action for non-compliance.
The cost of auditing and remediating your website or application to ensure accessibility remains the same, whether you act proactively or reactively in response to a demand letter or lawsuit.
However, the realized cost of facing legal action is far more expensive if you maintain inaccessible digital assets.
In addition to the costs outlined in this article to ensure your digital footprint is in compliance, you face additional fines, legal fees, and settlement expenses, which are generally far more costly than proactively addressing accessibility.
Additionally, settlement fees can generally be significantly reduced when you’ve shown good faith efforts to build and maintain WCAG compliance in your digital lifecycles and are working with a reputable vendor.
Market Reach and Inclusivity
Let’s face it: regulations and legal demands are the ultimate needle mover for most businesses. In reality, they shouldn’t be the deciding factor when making the investment to ensure your website or applications are accessible.
Over one billion people globally have some form of disability. By making your digital assets accessible, you’re not only complying with regulations but also tapping into a significant market segment.
Personally, I am not aware of many other marketing or business initiatives teams fail to budget for and invest in that explicitly exclude one billion potential customers.
At this stage in the digital age, no brands ignore their customer reach when it comes to SEO or social media.
It’s always puzzling to me that internal champions struggle with garnering a budget for accessibility or are forced into low-cost, easy-button solutions that barely scratch the service on equitable access or reducing legal risk until legally forced to invest.
Specifically, these low-cost solutions generally counteract the lift your team could see related to SEO by focusing on accessibility at the code level.
No brand ignores its SEO or social media reach and fails to invest in winning more customers in these realms. Similarly, you need to stop ignoring your customers’ accessibility needs, as you are likely leaving millions of potential customers on the outside looking in, regardless of your business vertical.
Hybrid Approach: Human-Led Testing and Automation
A hybrid approach that combines human-led testing with automated testing is crucial for comprehensive accessibility.
While automated tools can quickly identify many issues, human testers are essential for nuanced assessments, especially for non-mature accessibility teams without deep internal expertise or the ability to perform their own manual testing.
Relying solely on automation can lead to gaps in coverage and a poor return on investment.
The Role of Human-Led Testing
Human-led testing is vital for understanding the real-world user experience. Testers can identify issues that automated tools will undoubtedly miss.
Even the best automated testing tools, when not run by an accessibility SME, will only realistically uncover about a third of accessibility violations. Full-stop, human-led testing, including people with disabilities, is a must if you are serious about ensuring elements such as keyboard navigation problems, modals, complex menus, and the usability of interactive elements.
Human testers can also provide valuable feedback on the overall user experience, ensuring that it meets the needs of all users and goes beyond simply complying with the WCAG success criteria.
The Role of Automated Testing
Automated testing tools are essential for efficiently identifying common accessibility issues. These tools can quickly scan large amounts of content and provide actionable insights.
This is critical in ensuring your team can scale accessibility across mass amounts of pages and easy-to-identify elements such as alt-text and heading levels, which would be impossible to uncover with manual testing across a large swatch of views but also have a strong impact on the accessibility and navigation of your website and applications.
However, as outlined, they should be used in conjunction with human-led testing to ensure comprehensive coverage, as an automation-only approach simply will not provide the necessary coverage.
Key Considerations for Building Your Accessibility Budget
When mapping out costs, it is important that businesses consider each of the following elements related to a robust digital accessibility roadmap:
- Initial Audit and Remediation: The first step is a comprehensive assessment of your website or application to identify and fix accessibility issues. This process involves collaboration with your internal team, your existing digital agency or finding a third-party vendor to implement the necessary fixes. If you need a recommended partner for implementation, Allyant works directly with many leading global digital agencies across all web platforms and CMS tools, and we’d be happy to provide recommendations.
- Ongoing Maintenance: Accessibility is an ongoing process, as outlined above. Budget for regular assessment and testing updates to maintain compliance. No vendor should provide you with a one-time or short-term cost with little to no ongoing support—this simply will not be a realistic or sustainable cost estimate for your ongoing needs.
- Training and Support: Invest in training for your team to ensure they can uphold accessibility standards. I strongly recommend to the clients I work with that this be a part of employee onboarding—specifically for all employees who will work with or affect digital assets within their core job functions!
- Legal and Compliance Costs: Factor in potential legal fees and costs associated with compliance documentation and reporting if you are not in compliance. This includes if you are currently working with an ‘easy button’ solution that will not provide any risk mitigation or preventative legal support in the case of a demand letter or lawsuit. Our Allyant Accessibility Claims Team has an unrivalled track record and extensive data to back up how this provides invaluable support for your clients. Reach out to our team; we’d be happy to share this data!
Accessibility Cost Breakdown
What determines your accessibility project cost?
Any reputable accessibility vendor should inform you that this entirely depends on your needs.
However, they should also be able to quickly distill down a detailed project plan built for your specific website or application.
I have always compared this to building a house. If you call a builder and ask how much it will cost to build a house without giving them at least the square footage, style you are looking for, or a blueprint of your plans, they almost certainly would not give you a cost estimate – aside from stating it could be anywhere from $150,000 to over a million dollars.
Not super helpful!
Estimating the cost of digital accessibility is not entirely different. Aside from the fact a project will almost certainly not cost you anywhere near a million dollars, and within a few business days, you should be able to obtain a very detailed project scope and price estimate that you can execute!
A few key factors determine the cost of your project, and no vendor should offer a ‘one size fits all’ price. These factors include:
- The number of templates or components that form the foundation of your website or application and need to be tested.
- Do you have one or many core user paths that are critical for website or application usage? For example, the purchasing flow on an e-commerce site includes the homepage, selecting a product, placing it in the cart, and executing a checkout.
- The complexity of your website or application should be strongly considered and articulated by your vendor’s pricing. A simple 10-page WordPress brochure website should be substantially cheaper to assess and maintain than a highly complex post-authentication web application with a few complex components and user flows.
What is an estimated accessibility project cost?
This is a trick question based on all the above factors. The truth is, without having a discussion with your team and reviewing your accessibility goals and website or application, the answer to that question is, “I’m not sure.”
Any vendor providing you with an estimate without any context is likely making an educated guess at best, and it might not be accurate.
I strongly encourage you to contact our team of Digital Accessibility subject matter experts here at Allyant. We would happily provide a fully detailed scope and cost estimate specific to your in-scope digital properties within 2-3 business days to build into your budget and internal discussions.
We have a highly technical scoping team that is trained in building out custom project plans and pricing based on the multitude of factors outlined above, and we’d be happy to help — rather than your team trying to rely on ballpark estimates!
You may be reading this article to help get a rough range of what this might cost as you enter a budgeting discussion, react to a demand letter or lawsuit, or make the case to your leadership team that this needs to be a high-priority business focus in the coming months. Providing an estimated cost without context would lead you astray.
To that end, the following bullet points are a breakdown of the various costs that are generally associated with a digital accessibility project plan that you should be factoring into your vendor conversations:
- Initial Audit: Plain and simple, your team needs a health assessment of where you stand and what must be fixed to ensure your website or application conforms to the WCAG success criteria. A website assessment can vary greatly depending on the size and complexity of the site, as outlined above. Additionally, suppose you are looking to assess a complex application and need a VPAT or ACR to provide to your customers. In that case, this assessment based on application complexity can also vary greatly.
- Remediation of Accessibility Issues: Once you get the health assessment, the next step is to map out a remediation plan with your vendor and development team. This is very difficult to estimate as several factors go into determining it.
For example, if you have an internal development team, regardless of their experience with WCAG, they can fix our findings due to the level of detail our team provides with our audit reports in our HUB platform. This also allows them to prioritize the most critical issues in upcoming sprint cycles, and you should have no need to pay an external vendor for remediation — unless your team has little to no bandwidth to tackle accessibility in the short term. This also goes a long way in upskilling your team and reduces ongoing accessibility issues within your website or application through future development cycles, which is a major cost saver in the long term!
If you are working with an existing digital agency, as most of our clients are, many leading agencies already have experience working with Allyant or can collaborate with us on mapping our findings into their project plans and within your existing engagement with their team. However, if you are looking to carve out a separate project with your agency or one that we could recommend who has strong experience working with our team and shared clients, the remediation cost of accessibility issues (from my experience) can vary greatly. This range depends on the urgency of remediation and the overall number and complexity of the issues that need to be addressed – but post-assessment, most agencies can provide a solid estimate of what this will entail. - Ongoing Maintenance: Organizations should factor in the cost of ongoing accessibility reviews and maintenance. This is the only way to protect their upfront accessibility investment and ensure that their website or application stays in conformance through updates and enhancements.
For most organizations, once they’ve made the initial investment in accessibility and moved their key components and templates into conformance, they fit into ‘maintenance’ mode with a vendor like Allyant. At this stage, for most clients we perform twice-annual live-user re-assessments of their website or application and perform on-demand QA testing or Design Reviews of new feature releases and enhancements.
However, if you are working with a reputable vendor that is upskilling your team and helping you manage ongoing compliance at the source, your year-over-year cost for digital accessibility should be stable or even reduced overtime until you go through a full site re-design or migration, which would trigger a natural re-audit at that time. - Accessibility Training: One of my strongest recommendations to client teams and agency partners I’m working with is to invest in digital accessibility training, even if this is only focused on building awareness into their day-to-day routines. Our Allyant Training team provides robust training to build buy-in on accessibility and cover in-depth sessions for specific team members within their roles — such as Designers and Developers.
This training is built in collaboration with your team’s goals. All sessions include a recording at no additional cost to ensure you can upskill new hires in employee onboarding or include this recurring training for team members whose role strongly impacts your overall digital accessibility conformance.
Project Timelines and Honest Scoping
A thorough project audit, including manual testing and addressing site-wide accessibility issues, typically takes 2-4+ weeks, depending on project complexity.
An honest vendor will provide a realistic timeline and scope that covers key user journeys, templates, and project milestones.
If your vendor is telling you they will cover a robust scope of views with human testing in just a few days or only a few weeks in very complex environments, it should raise concerns with your internal team! Rushing this process or cutting corners can result in missed issues and additional costs down the road.
Realistic Timelines
A typical accessibility audit and project plan will generally follow the below timelines based on our vast experience working with more than 1,500 clients and a long list of leading digital agencies and implementation partners:
- Initial Audit (2-6 weeks): Identify accessibility issues, provide a priority level on each issue, and create a robust remediation plan that includes recommended fixes and code samples for your team to implement a successful change. If a vendor offers to turn back results to your team within a few days, manual testing is likely not included, or they are simply running automated testing tools you could leverage at no cost on your own. Be certain you have a clear vision of what the audit covers, including a detailed scope of views, how it is performed, and what the output delivery platform will look like, to ensure your team can take action quickly on resolving issues.
- Remediation and QA Re-Testing (2-6+ months): Addressing identified issues and conducting thorough re-testing to ensure compliance, in full reality, takes most teams many months. This is due to the fact most teams don’t “stop” or “adjust” their robust development plans and sprint cycles to only work on accessibility. This highlights the importance of working with a vendor like Allyant, who will prioritize each issue based on the severity, and practical impact on the end-user is critical. Your team can immediately identify the most critical issues and first roadmap those into upcoming sprint cycles.
- Ongoing Maintenance: Regular maintenance audits and on-demand testing of updates to maintain accessibility standards should be factored into your long-term plan and budget. Accessibility, like anything else on your website, is not a one-and-done project. Most organizations are constantly changing their website or going through re-designing on a rolling 2-to-3-year (or less!) basis, so your accessibility never stops, which a reputable vendor will be up-front about and build out a long-term project plan and budget expectation to address.
Resource Cost of Accessibility: Forming a Task Force
Effective accessibility initiatives require collaboration across various departments. One of the quickest ways to lose momentum with digital accessibility initiatives is by not having all the necessary teams on board!
I strongly recommend establishing a task force that includes representatives from the digital, marketing, IT, and legal teams.
This cross-functional team ensures that accessibility is integrated into every aspect of your digital strategy and broader business goals.
The legal team can navigate compliance issues, IT can handle technical implementations, marketing can ensure inclusive content, and the digital team can oversee the user experience.
Defining Roles and Responsibilities
Each department has a critical role in ensuring digital accessibility:
- Digital Team: Oversees the implementation of accessibility standards in design and user experience — or bridging the gap between accessibility teams and your third-party digital agency.
- Marketing Team: Ensures all content, including images, videos, and written materials, meets accessibility guidelines. This ensures accessibility is maintained across the organization going forward.
- IT Team: Implements technical solutions, such as accessible coding practices and compatibility with assistive technologies, while also supporting any security protocols and successfully onboarding your accessibility vendor and their platforms.
- Legal Team: This team provides guidance on compliance and helps mitigate legal risks, working in lockstep with your digital accessibility vendor if they are providing strong litigation support—which should be a key element of your decision-making process.
Additional Factors in the Cost of Digital Accessibility
Selecting a Reputable Vendor
Choosing the right vendor is crucial, especially for complex projects and in the growing age of pop-up accessibility vendors with little to no experience or staff to support your needs.
Like the high-volume plaintiff firms capturing the market with demand letters and lawsuits that are not served with the best interest of people with disabilities in mind, many small vendors are looking to grab accessibility market share but not providing their customers with the service of deliverables they need to push WCAG conformance across the finish line.
A reputable vendor will not only have a strong track record that they are willing to document on-demand with reputable client examples, but also provide a detailed project plan and scope of work.
For example, at Allyant, we have more than 1,500+ active customers who are working with us to ensure their customer communications and digital assets are accessible.
If you are reading this, we are likely working with one of your closest competitors to ensure they are tapping into a much broader market – reach out, and we will let you know!
This plan should outline key views, components, or templates that will be tested to prevent confusion and rework down the line while also mapping out a plan to tackle your digital documents, such as PDFs, on your website.
Building a Detailed Project Plan
Working with a vendor who can create a comprehensive project plan is essential. This plan should include specific steps and timelines for accessibility across your digital properties.
Additionally, this should be provided through an easy-to-track platform that provides your team with actionable results in a collaborative work environment.
Our Allyant HUB Platform even connects with external development tools such as JIRA through a bilateral integration, ensuring seamless collaboration between our accessibility experts and your developers on implementing fixes and managing ongoing QA testing.
If your vendor is providing you with results in a spreadsheet or long-form reports that are not easy to digest or implement, your team is not going to be successful at ensuring you resolve and maintain WCAG conformance.
Another key indicator of a reputable vendor is their commitment to protecting your initial investment through strong litigation support and ongoing accessibility testing.
For example, Allyant offers robust risk mitigation and litigation support services, helping organizations remain compliant and avoid costly legal issues. If you receive a demand letter or lawsuit, our Accessibility Claims Team provides human-led support, working directly with your internal or external counsel.
The high-volume plaintiffs don’t fall for auto-generated or templated reports; receiving real-time feedback from accessibility SMEs will ensure your investment holds weight in the event of a demand letter or lawsuit.
It is critical you ask your vendor about this support and their proven track record with such claims before considering an accessibility project.
Allyant’s Strategic Approach
At Allyant, we take a human-led, consultative approach to each project. We work closely with clients and every key stakeholder to understand their accessibility goals, assess where they are on their accessibility journey, and consider project complexity.
Unlike vendors with set pricing or one-size-fits-all solutions, we tailor our services to meet your specific needs, ensuring you receive the most effective and efficient accessibility solutions tailored for your organization.
By strategically planning and investing in digital accessibility, organizations can not only comply with regulations but also enhance their user experience, expand their audience, and protect themselves from legal risks.
Partnering with a knowledgeable and reputable vendor like Allyant can make this process seamless and successful.
For more information on how Allyant can assist your organization with its digital accessibility needs and get a custom-built project plan to drive forward digital inclusion for your organization, reach out to our team at the form below.
