Accessibility audit report
- What the audit costs
- $3,480
- Pages an auditor actually opens
- 19
- Sampled pages per template
- 2
- Hours of manual testing
- 11
These sheets have almost no constants. Every number is worked from the figures you enter: the pages, the templates, the images without alt text, the forms, the videos, the PDFs, the criteria failing, the minutes a fix takes, your developer's and the auditor's hourly rates, the sample share, the retest rate, the open issues and the rate you close them. The one figure that is not yours is the count of WCAG 2.2 Level AA success criteria the checklist scores against, which is the standard's own and is cited where it is used. The defaults are one 240-page site's worked example, not a benchmark this site publishes.
The figures are a worked example for a 240-page site with nine templates: $3,480. Put your own page count in and the answer changes.
Download the Accessibility audit report worked example (CSV)
This is the accessibility audit report sheet, and it prices the audit before you buy it. Enter the pages, the templates, the share of pages an auditor will sample, the minutes they spend on each, their hourly rate, the hours of write-up and the retest as a share of the audit. It returns the pages actually opened, the sampled pages per template, the manual hours, what the audit costs, how much of that is the write-up, what the retest costs, the two together, and the number nobody puts in a proposal: how many pages nobody will open. That last figure is what a conformance claim rests on.
The sample, and what it leaves unseen
8% of 240 pages is 19 pages opened and 220 unseen, across nine templates that is two sampled pages a template. Two is the minimum that shows whether a failure is in the template or in the content, so a smaller sample on a template-heavy site is not a cheaper audit, it is a weaker one.
The cost, split between testing and writing
19 pages at 35 minutes is 11 hours of testing; add 12 hours of write-up and at $150 an hour the audit is $3,480, of which $1,800 is the report. Two quotes that differ by a factor of three usually differ on the sample and the write-up, and this splits them.
The retest, which is the evidence
At 40% the retest is $1,392, taking the pair to $4,872. Budget it at the start: an audit with no retest is a list nobody closes, and the retest is the document a buyer or a lawyer actually asks to see.
Where the constants in this tool come from
W3C WAI: Website Accessibility Conformance Evaluation Methodology (WCAG-EM).
Questions people ask about the Accessibility audit report
What sample share is defensible?
Enough to cover every template and every interaction type. Percentage alone is a poor guide: a 2,000-page site on six templates needs fewer sampled pages than a 200-page site on thirty.
Why price the write-up separately?
Because it is often half the invoice, and because a report you cannot act on is the most expensive thing in this field.
Is the retest always 40%?
It is a common shape and it is a figure you enter. Ask each supplier for theirs as a separate line.