What Does a Website Accessibility Audit Cost for a School District?

The four things people call an "audit"

1. Free automated checkers

Browser tools such as WAVE and Lighthouse, and free scans like ours, cost nothing. They find common, machine-detectable barriers such as missing alt text, low contrast, empty links and unlabeled form fields. They cannot judge everything WCAG asks for, and a browser extension only checks the page you are looking at.

2. Ongoing monitoring

A subscription that rescans your site on a schedule and tells you when something new breaks. This is the part that keeps a fixed site fixed, because school sites change every week. ADA Genie's plans are $59 and $99 per month; larger enterprise platforms are usually priced by quote.

3. Manual expert audits

A person with accessibility expertise tests your pages by hand, with a keyboard and screen readers, against every WCAG 2.1 AA success criterion. One accessibility firm publishes a range of $1,250 to $2,750 for most clients, or roughly $100 to $250 per primary page. Price is driven by how many pages are in scope, how complex they are (forms, menus, sliders), and how many problems the site already has.

4. Remediation

Fixing what the audit finds. Content fixes are mostly your own staff's time. Template fixes belong with your web vendor. Document remediation, for PDFs you cannot simply rebuild, is usually priced per page by specialist vendors.

Why school websites are expensive to audit by hand

A district site can have thousands of pages and more PDFs than anyone has counted. No one hand-tests all of it. Manual audits test a representative sample, following the approach in the W3C's WCAG evaluation methodology, and the size of that sample is the biggest lever on price. And because content changes weekly, any audit is a snapshot of one moment.

What we would budget for, in order

1. A free automated baseline, so you know the size of the problem before you spend anything.
2. Fixing the obvious content issues with your own staff: alt text, link text, headings, the worst PDFs.
3. Monitoring, so new uploads do not quietly undo the work.
4. A manual expert review of your templates and most important tasks, such as enrollment, forms and the calendar, before your compliance date or whenever you need a formal conformance report.

That order puts the cheapest information first and saves the expensive expert hours for the things only an expert can judge.

What to put in an RFP or quote request

• Scope. Every domain and subdomain, roughly how many pages, whether PDFs are included, embedded tools from other companies, and any mobile app.
• Standard. WCAG 2.1 AA, the standard in the DOJ's Title II rule.
• Method. Automated and manual testing, which screen readers, and how pages are sampled.
• Deliverables. Each issue with its location, a screenshot, the WCAG criterion, its priority, and who can fix it.
• Retesting. Whether fixes are verified, and how many rounds are included.
• Qualifications. Who does the testing and what experience or certifications they hold.
• After the audit. Whether ongoing monitoring is available, and what it costs.

One caution on price

Be wary of anything that promises compliance by adding a script or widget to your site. A widget does not change the content and code underneath, which is where the barriers are. Whatever you buy, the fixes have to happen in the site itself.