What a WCAG audit costs in the UK (and what you get)

UK accessibility audits typically range from around £350 to £5,000+ for a single site, depending on how much of the site is tested, how thoroughly, and by whom. The real difference between providers isn't really the price, it's whether the audit is genuinely manual (a person using a keyboard and a screen reader) or mostly automated with a manual label attached. Automated tools catch roughly 30–40% of real accessibility issues at best, so an audit's value comes almost entirely from the manual testing portion. Here's what's actually driving the price you'll see, and what you should expect for it.

What UK providers currently charge

Pricing in this space varies more by scope and depth than by any fixed rate. Here's what's publicly listed by established UK providers at the time of writing:

• Damteq: accessibility audits from around £1,500+VAT, varying by site size and complexity
• Jim Byrne Accessibility Testing: full WCAG 2.2 audits starting at £2,500, rising to £3,000 if disabled testers are involved
• AbilityNet: Digital Accessibility Reviews at £4,950+VAT, covering the homepage, navigation, header/footer plus roughly 10 components

That's a genuine spread, roughly £1,500 at the low end to £5,000+ at the high end for a single-site review from most established providers. Broader industry cost guides (mostly US-facing but a useful reference point) put small-business audits in a similar £1,500–£7,000-equivalent range, rising sharply for larger or more complex sites.

Rather than one fixed price for every site regardless of size, Accessimo's audit is offered in three tiers, scaled to how much of your site you need tested rather than treating a one-page store and a full multi-step checkout as the same job. All three use the same manual testing method; what changes is coverage, not thoroughness.

What actually drives the price

Three things move the number more than anything else:

1. How much of it is genuinely manual. This is the single biggest factor, and the one that's hardest to see from a price list alone. A £200 "audit" that's mostly an automated scan with a summary written around it is a fundamentally different product from one where someone actually tabs through your checkout with a keyboard and listens to it with a screen reader. The price difference reflects real hours of skilled human testing time, not padding.

2. How much of the site is covered. A homepage-only review is cheaper and tells you very little on its own. A review of your actual purchase journey, browsing, product pages, cart, checkout, costs more because it's testing where accessibility issues actually cost you sales, not just where they're easiest to find. This is exactly the difference between Accessimo's three tiers, covered in detail below.

3. Deliverables beyond the findings themselves. Some providers include VPAT/ACR documentation, disabled tester involvement, or live walkthroughs with your development team, all of which add cost. Whether you need these depends on your situation, a formal conformance report matters more if you're responding to a specific procurement or legal requirement than if you're a small ecommerce store making a first pass at compliance.

Accessimo's three audit tiers

Every tier includes the same core method: an automated scan first, then genuine manual keyboard-only and NVDA screen reader testing, a severity-rated findings report, and delivery within 2 working days. What changes between tiers is how much of your site gets that treatment.

Single Page Audit, £350. Manual testing of a single page of your choice. A reasonable starting point if you want to check one high-priority page, such as your homepage or a key landing page, before deciding whether to commit to wider testing, or if your site is genuinely small and simple enough that one page covers most of what a visitor sees.

3-Page Audit, £1,350. Manual testing across three pages from your real purchase journey, for example a category page, a product page, and your cart. Useful if you want a meaningful cross-section of the buying experience without covering every step.

Full Audit, £1,500. Manual testing across the full purchase journey, homepage, category page, product page, cart, and checkout, the actual path a customer takes from arrival to purchase, not an arbitrary page count. This is the tier most directly comparable to the full-site reviews from other UK providers listed above.

Which tier fits depends on what you're trying to find out. A Single Page Audit is a sensible first step if you're testing the waters or have a specific page you're worried about. The Full Audit is the more complete picture if you want confidence across the whole buying journey, since checkout in particular is where accessibility issues tend to cost the most.

Why the manual portion is what you're actually paying for

This is worth spelling out clearly, because it's easy to assume a higher price automatically means a more thorough automated scan. It doesn't, automated tools have a hard ceiling on what they can find, regardless of price.

In 2018, the UK Government Digital Service ran 13 automated accessibility tools against a single page into which 142 known accessibility barriers had been deliberately introduced. The best-performing tool, SortSite, caught 40% of them. WAVE caught 30%. axe, the engine behind many popular tools including Google Lighthouse, caught 29%. The UK's Department for Work and Pensions still cites this benchmark in its own accessibility manual today, summarising it as "the best tools only found around 30 to 40 percent" of known issues.

That ceiling hasn't moved because of what automated testing fundamentally is: it can check whether code has the right structural properties (is there an alt attribute, is there enough colour contrast, is there a label element). It cannot tab through your site and notice a dropdown menu that won't close, or listen with a screen reader and notice your cart announces itself as empty right after you've added something to it. Those are the issues that actually affect whether a sale completes, and they only surface when a real person operates the site the way a disabled customer would.

So when you're comparing audit prices, the honest question isn't "how much does this cost," it's "how much of this is a person actually using my site by hand." That's where the price should be going, whichever tier or provider you choose.

What a genuine manual audit should include

Whatever provider you choose, a real manual audit should cover:

• An automated scan first, fast, useful for catching the surface-level issues (missing alt text, contrast gaps), and a reasonable starting point before the manual work begins
• Keyboard-only testing, no mouse, tabbing through the pages in scope: navigation, forms, and any interactive elements
• Screen reader testing, using NVDA, a free screen reader commonly used for UK compliance testing, listening to what's actually announced rather than assuming the underlying code is correct
• A severity-rated findings report, what's affected, how it impacts a real customer, and what needs to change, written so a developer can act on it directly
• A completed purchase attempt, where checkout is in scope, done at least twice, once keyboard-only and once by screen reader, since this is where accessibility issues tend to cost the most

If a quote doesn't include genuine keyboard and screen reader testing of the pages you're paying for, you're likely paying largely for an automated scan with a report wrapped around it, worth knowing before you compare it against a fully manual audit on price alone.

Getting your audit and what happens next

Whichever tier you choose, we diagnose and report; we don't fix the code as part of the audit itself. A retest after you've made changes can be booked separately, or comes included if you move to our Managed monitoring afterward, which covers ongoing quarterly manual re-checks and a capped amount of direct code fixing each year, for businesses that want compliance maintained rather than checked once and left.

You can see exactly what this looks like in practice in our published case studies, including a checkout where a payment method was completely unreachable by keyboard, a Blocker-level issue that no automated scan, at any price, would have caught.

Not sure where to start?

It's automated, so, consistent with everything above, it will catch the surface-level issues and miss the ones that only show up under real keyboard and screen reader testing. That's exactly the gap a manual audit exists to close.

Compare our three audit tiers

Frequently asked questions

Why is there such a big price range between providers?

Mostly because "audit" isn't a standardised product. The price mainly reflects how much genuine manual testing time is included and how much of the site is covered, a mostly-automated review with a written summary will cost far less than a fully manual test of a full purchase journey, even though both might be marketed as an "audit."

Is a cheaper, mostly-automated audit worth doing at all?

It's better than nothing for catching surface-level issues like missing alt text or poor contrast, but it will miss the majority of what actually affects a disabled customer's experience, automated tools cap out around 30–40% detection even under ideal conditions. Treat it as a first pass, not a compliance assessment.

Does an audit mean my site is now legally compliant?

No audit, at any price or scope, can promise permanent compliance, sites change constantly (new products, redesigns, third-party app updates), and a site that passes today can develop new issues next month. An audit gives you an accurate, dated picture of what was tested and what to address; ongoing monitoring is what maintains that picture over time.

Which audit tier should I choose?

It depends on what you want to find out. A Single Page Audit suits a first look at a specific page, or a genuinely small site where one page represents most of the experience. A 3-Page Audit gives a useful cross-section of the buying journey without covering every step. A Full Audit covers the entire purchase journey through to checkout, the most complete picture and the one most comparable to a full-site review from another provider.

Do I need a VPAT or Accessibility Conformance Report?

Only if you have a specific reason to, typically a procurement requirement from a larger customer or partner. For most UK ecommerce SMEs focused on EAA and Equality Act obligations, a detailed findings report is the more directly useful deliverable; a formal VPAT/ACR is an additional, separate service some providers offer.

What's the difference between an audit and monitoring?

An audit is a one-off, point-in-time check, useful for establishing where you stand or meeting a specific deadline. Monitoring is ongoing: a recurring check that catches new issues as your site changes, plus (with a managed plan) a capped amount of direct code fixing each year. Most businesses that take accessibility seriously long-term end up needing both, an initial audit to establish a baseline, then monitoring to keep it accurate.