Calculating the Cost of Making your Website ADA Compliant – AccessiBe

ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) Title III refers to the need for all places of public accommodation to be made accessible to people with disabilities. As interpreted by the Department of Justice, websites and other web utilities are also places for public accommodation and should be compliant with the ADA regulations. So, there is an immediate need for website owners to check their websites for accessibility compliance and to take corrective measures to find any non-compliance.

For those looking to make their site ADA compliant, the cost is a major consideration. There are no such set standards for accessibility compliance services, which doubles people’s confusion about it. In this article, we will discuss some important aspects to consider in deciding the cost of making your website ADA compliant.

AccessiBe – whether to outsource or do in-house?

Any big web project requires a skilled team to handle it. The need for web accessibility is also no exception to this. In the case of an e-commerce site or an online financial services website, it takes quite some effort to make it accessible. Before initiating any accessibility compliance project, you have to decide whether to do it in-house (you have an expert team internally) or outsource to a professional service. AccessiBe is an expert provider with years of expertise in dealing with the accessibility compliance projects of various clients.

Cost is proportionate to the complexity

The cost of your accessibility project may depend on the complexity of your site. The larger and more complex your website is (as like e-com sites or online marketplaces), the higher the cost involved may be. We can categorize the site complexity into three levels.

A simple content website with lower compliance costs.
Basic transactional or e-com site.
Bigger transactional sites like enterprise e-com sites are much more complex with several pages, templates, plugins, and dynamic elements.

Types of site content

While determining the cost involved in achieving ADA compliance for your website, what type of content is distributed across the website should also be considered. For example, all your images need to have meaningful alt texts, the videos should be captioned and given audio descriptions, all PDFs and online documents should be made accessible, third-party content should also be ensured full compliance, and you should also make sure that the HTML code and CSS styling is done as per the WCAG standards of accessibility compliance. Based on these needs, the accessibility consultant may give you a customized cost for your project.

Once you have the audit report with a list of vulnerabilities, you can sit with the consultant to build a remediation roadmap and estimate the resources and cost involved to initiate the compliance project. In the beginning, you may have to bear the cost of testing your website through automation and manual methods to identify what changes and additions are to be made to meet the WCAG standards. AccessiBe offers complete testing of your website to identify all the accessibility challenges and share a customized estimate for the cost involved.