The Access Audit

Independent WCAG 2.1 AA testing — Aaron Siebold

Most websites have accessibility problems the owner was never told about.

You get a report: every page scanned by two rule engines and walked with a keyboard, each problem ranked critical to minor with its fix.

From $149
Whole-site scan, every page
From $900
Remediation, priced by findings
$149/mo
Monitoring, re-scan and alert

Two reasons people fix this

Customers who cannot finish

More than 1 in 4 US adults has some type of disability. When a checkout cannot be completed with a keyboard, or a product image has no description, that is not an abstract standards violation. It is a customer who wanted to buy from you and left.

This is the reason that pays for itself, and it is the reason we lead with.

Prevalence figure: US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Disability Impacts All of Us.

The legal picture, as context

Filings are rising, and they concentrate in retail. That is the industry picture, not a prediction about you: we have no idea whether anyone has any claim against your site, we will never suggest otherwise, and we do not sell certification or lawsuit immunity.

6,000+
ADA website lawsuits projected in the United States for 2026, nearly 20% above 2025.
~70%
of 2025 filings were against e-commerce sites. Shopify was the most-named platform, in 33.4% of 2025 filings and 44.3% of those in the first quarter of 2026.
~1 in 4
of those sites had already installed an accessibility widget. Buying a script tag is not the same as fixing the site.

Projection and category share: UsableNet. Platform and widget figures: EcomBack’s 2025 annual and Q1 2026 lawsuit reports. Figures are the industry-wide picture and say nothing about any individual site.

How it works

Four steps. You send a URL; you get a document your developer can work from.

  1. Scan

    We crawl your site and test every page against WCAG 2.1 Level A and AA with two independent engines: axe-core, the engine inside Google Lighthouse, cross-checked against IBM Equal Access. Two rule sets catch what either one alone would miss. The same crawl also records what a machine can read from each page: structured data, page titles, and the rules your site sets for automated crawlers. Those go in the report as notes, not as WCAG findings, because several of them are the same fix.

  2. Drive the keyboard

    A second pass walks your site with the Tab key and records what a keyboard-only visitor experiences: anything they cannot reach, anywhere focus gets stuck, whether the order makes sense, and whether they can see where they are. This runs on every plan, including the cheapest one.

  3. Judge what a machine cannot

    On Audit and above, a person listens to the site with a screen reader and decides the things no tool can: whether a button’s announced name actually describes what it does, whether the reading order tells a coherent story, whether an image description is useful or just present.

  4. Fix list, then verify

    You get an HTML and PDF report: every issue ranked critical through minor, the exact elements affected, and a step-by-step fix guide for each rule, written to be handed straight to a developer. Conformance and Max re-scan after your fixes land and show the before-and-after delta.

The deliverable, not a promise

We built a small store, broke it on purpose, and pointed the pipeline at it. The faults it finds are the ones real shops have. Nothing in the report is hand-written or tidied up afterwards.

Open the sample report See the store it audited

Pricing

Every plan scans every page on your site and drives the whole thing with a keyboard. What separates the tiers is how much human review comes with that. Scan, Audit and Conformance can be bought below; you enter your website address at checkout and the report comes back by email.

The plan columns scroll sideways on a narrow screen; the row labels stay put.

All prices in USD. Turnaround is in business days from the day we receive your URL.
Scan $149 Small online shops, local and service sites. Everything a machine can test, nothing you have to book. Buy Scan Audit $795 Shops and clinics that want a person to test checkout with a screen reader. Buy Audit Conformance $2,250 Procurement, grants and enterprise vendor review. Buy Conformance Max from $3,900 Large catalogues where checkout is the exposure. Ask about Max
Pages scanned Every page Every page Every page Every page, whole origin
Automated engines axe-core + IBM Equal Access axe-core + IBM Equal Access axe-core + IBM Equal Access axe-core + IBM Equal Access
Keyboard, focus and trap audit Included Included Included Included
Machine-readability notes Included Included Included Included
Severity-ranked report, HTML + PDF Included Included Included Included
Element-level fix guidance Included Included Included Included
Screen-reader review by a person Not included Key templates Every template Every template, plus full checkout
Image-description quality review Not included Included Included Included
Prioritized remediation roadmap Not included With effort estimates With effort estimates With effort estimates
VPAT 2.5Rev / ACR for procurement Not included Not included Included Included
Post-fix re-scan with delta Not included Not included Once Quarterly for 12 months
Findings walkthrough call Not included Not included Included Included
Turnaround 2 days 4 days 7–10 days 10–15 days

Why the entry price is what it is

The scan, the two rule engines and the keyboard walk are all automated and run unattended, so they cost us close to nothing and we do not charge as though they were hand work. That is the whole reason a nine-page restaurant pays $149 and gets the same keyboard testing a large retailer gets. It used to be a four-figure line item; it is software now, and the price should say so.

What is left is genuinely a person’s time, and that is what the higher tiers buy: listening to the site with a screen reader, deciding whether an announced name makes sense, writing a VPAT, sitting on a call. Longer and harder work, higher price. Nothing above the entry tier is sold to a business that does not need it.

Bigger sites

The listed price covers your whole site up to 100 pages, so a 12-page site pays exactly the listed price. There is no bracket to round up into. Past 100 pages, every plan adds a flat $0.35 per additional page, capped at $900 no matter how large the site gets. Max includes the first 250.

The number of pages is not the number of problems. A 1,500-product store is usually five or six templates repeated. Fix the product template once and you have fixed 1,200 pages. That is why the report groups findings by template, why the per-page rate is small, and why the cap exists at all.

Worked example, a 1,546-page Shopify catalogue:
Scan $149 + 1,446 × $0.35 = $655 · Audit $1,301 · Max $3,900 + 1,296 × $0.35 = $4,354

Getting it fixed

Priced by what gets fixed, not by how long it takes. Once the audit has run we quote from the findings it actually produced: $900 for 1–10 findings, $1,800 for 11–25, $3,200 for 26–50, and a quote above that.

A rule that appears on forty pages counts once, because it is one fix. A finding that lives in your platform’s own components or a third-party embed is flagged in the report and never billed as ours to fix. Nothing is quoted before the audit has run, so you never pay to fix problems you do not have — and you are equally free to hand the report to your own developer instead; it is written for exactly that. Ongoing monitoring, a monthly re-scan with a diff and an alert, is $149/month.

For comparison, accessible.org publishes $1,250–$2,750 for a fully manual audit at $100–$250 per primary page. A fully manual audit is a different product and is worth what it costs; we are the faster, broader-coverage option, not a cheaper copy of it. Same WCAG 2.1 AA standard either way.

The IRS Disabled Access Credit (Form 8826) may apply to accessibility work. Worth asking your tax preparer about.

The honest part

No scan makes you “compliant,” and neither does a widget. Automated tools catch roughly half of WCAG issues — that is axe-core’s own published figure for its own engine. That is why the Audit tier and above put a person in front of a screen reader, and why every report we send lists exactly what a scan cannot check.

Be careful with overlay widgets. Roughly a quarter of 2025 ADA web filings were against sites that already had one installed, and in April 2025 the Federal Trade Commission finalized an order requiring one overlay vendor to pay $1,000,000 over claims that its product could make any website compliant. That is one vendor’s advertising, not a verdict on every tool in the category. But it is a regulator on the record, and it is worth knowing before you buy a script tag that promises to solve this.

We will never sell you a certification, a guarantee against lawsuits, or legal advice. We sell you an accurate technical picture and a fix list.

Questions worth asking anyone selling you an audit

Will this make my site “ADA compliant”?

No one can honestly promise that — there is no official ADA certification for websites, and no audit or widget prevents someone from filing a claim. What we deliver is a technical assessment against WCAG 2.1 AA, the standard courts and regulators reference, plus the exact fix list. Whether that meets your legal obligations is a question for your attorney.

My site only has about a dozen pages. Am I paying for capacity I do not need?

No. Every plan covers your whole site up to 100 pages at the listed price, so a 9-page restaurant site and a 40-page clinic site pay the same $149 for a Scan and get every page tested, keyboard walk included. There is no tier you have to round up into, and no plan that leaves part of your site unscanned. If you run a small local business, the $149 Scan is very often the right and only thing to buy, and we will tell you so.

What do you need from me to start?

Just your website address, and which pages matter most to you (checkout, booking, contact). No logins, no code access, no install. Audits of pages behind a login are possible with a test account you create for the engagement.

Can you also fix what you find?

Yes. Remediation is priced from the findings your audit actually produced, not by the hour: $900 for 1 to 10 findings, $1,800 for 11 to 25, $3,200 for 26 to 50, and a quote above that. A rule that appears on forty pages counts once, because it is one fix. Nothing is quoted until the audit has run, so you never pay to fix problems you do not have. You are equally free to hand the report to your own developer; it is written for exactly that.

How do your prices compare to a specialist firm?

accessible.org publishes $1,250 to $2,750 for a fully manual audit. Our Scan and Audit tiers sit below that and Conformance sits inside it. The difference is where the hours go: the scan, both rule engines and the keyboard walk are automated end to end and the reports generate themselves, so you pay for the judgment — the screen-reader review, the prioritization, the fix guidance — not for hours of tooling work. A fully manual audit is a different product and is worth what it costs; we are the faster, broader-coverage option, not a cheaper copy of it. Same WCAG 2.1 AA standard either way.

How much of this is done by a machine, honestly?

All of the scanning and all of the keyboard testing. Two rule engines check every page, and a second pass drives the site with the Tab key to find what a keyboard-only visitor cannot reach, where focus gets stuck, whether the order matches the way the page reads, and whether the focus indicator is visible enough to see. That is deterministic work and we do not pretend otherwise.

What a machine cannot do is decide whether a button’s announced name actually describes what it does, whether an image description is useful or merely present, or how a screen-reader user experiences your checkout. That is a person, it is the reason the higher tiers cost more, and it is the honest boundary between the two.

How fast do you reply?

Within one business day, usually much faster. A Scan is delivered in 2 business days.

Start with the report

Send a URL and say which pages matter most. A Scan comes back in two business days, and you will know where the site stands before anyone asks you for money to fix it.