Website Accessibility: What Is Required, and What It Costs
Accessibility is not a separate line on our quotes. A step 03 business website is EUR 1.500 to 3.500 whether or not you ask for it, because the work that makes a page usable with a keyboard, a screen reader or a very large font is the same work that makes it a well built page.
What does cost extra is going back. Fixing a site that is already live is scoped and quoted as its own job, and the reason is simple: after launch, one decision has to be corrected everywhere it was already made differently.
What accessibility means in practice
Take away the standards language and it is a short list of things a page either does or does not do.
- Every control works from the keyboard alone, and you can see which control the keyboard is on.
- Text has enough contrast against what sits behind it, including text over photographs and text inside buttons.
- Every form field has a real label, and errors say what went wrong in words, next to the field they belong to.
- Meaningful images have alt text. Decorative images are marked as decoration so a screen reader skips them.
- Headings run in order and describe the page, so someone can jump through it instead of hearing all of it.
- Nothing relies on colour alone. A red border needs a sentence with it.
- Video has captions, audio has a transcript.
- The layout holds when someone zooms in, enlarges the text, or holds a phone in one hand.
None of that is bolted on at the end. Each line is a decision made anyway: a colour, a label, a heading, a component. Accessibility is the version of that decision that does not lock somebody out.
The standard, and the law
The reference everyone works from is WCAG, currently version 2.2, at level AA. It is what auditors test against and what procurement documents cite. Public sector bodies in the Netherlands are already legally held to its level AA criteria, and the European Accessibility Act extends obligations towards consumer facing services such as online shops and ticketing, treating the smallest businesses more lightly than large ones.
We are a design and engineering studio, not a law firm. If you sell to consumers online, or you tender for public work, have your position confirmed by someone qualified to sign it off. What we can do is build to WCAG 2.2 AA and tell you plainly where a page falls short of it.
Why retrofitting costs more
The cost of an accessibility change is not the edit itself. It is the number of places the change has to land, and what has to be retested once it does.
| The decision | Made while we build | Made after launch |
|---|---|---|
| Colour and contrast | Settled once in the palette, before anything is drawn with it | Every button, badge, link and hover state that used the old colour is redrawn |
| Menus, dialogs, date pickers | Built or chosen to work from the keyboard, once | Replaced, then every page that uses them is retested |
| Headings and alt text | Written with the page, by whoever writes the page | A pass back through everything already published |
| Testing | A keyboard and screen reader pass per template as it is finished | A full audit, a fix list, then a re-test of the site |
Building it in changes what a decision looks like. Retrofitting adds a project.
What it covers at each step
These are our standard steps, set out in full on packages. Same prices. The right hand column is what accessibility means at that size of site.
| Step | Price | What accessibility covers there |
|---|---|---|
| 01 Single-page landing | EUR 600-900 | Keyboard access, contrast, a properly labelled form, headings in order and alt text, on the one page |
| 02 Mini-site | EUR 900-1.500 | The same across two or three pages and the contact flow, plus CMS fields that ask your editor for alt text rather than hoping for it |
| 03 Business website | EUR 1.500-3.500 | Templates built accessibly once and reused across service pages, the booking or contact flow, and a walkthrough at handover so pages added later stay accessible |
| 04 Advanced site or web app | EUR 3.500-7.500 | The harder surfaces: login, dashboard, data tables, dialogs, charts, payments and chatbot flows, all of which have to work without a mouse |
| 05 Custom SaaS platform | from EUR 7.500 | Scoped after discovery, with accessible components written into the design system from the first screen |
Care at EUR 100 to 300 a month covers updates, monitoring, backups and small fixes, and correcting an accessibility slip in new content is a small fix. It is not a redesign and it is not new features. An accessibility retrofit of a site we did not build is scoped and quoted separately. A fixed quote always follows scoping.
SEO foundation, a one-off at EUR 450 to 750, overlaps here: page titles, heading structure and link text serve a screen reader and a search engine alike.
How the work runs
Scope first: what the site does, who uses it, what has to be reachable. Then design, where contrast, focus states and text sizes are settled in the palette and type scale instead of argued per screen. Then build, where each template gets a keyboard and screen reader pass as it is finished. Then content, then launch.
Timings follow the step: one to two weeks at step 01, two to three at step 02, three to six at step 03, six to twelve at step 04, and after discovery at step 05. The content pass is the part that waits on you, because alt text and plain error wording describe your business. How we work is on design and engineering, and the stack we build on is described on our Next.js development page.
When to spend less
- On a single page with a name and email field, the accessibility work is already inside the build price. A separate audit on top buys a document, not a better page.
- If budget is tight, fix what locks people out before what merely annoys them. Keyboard access, contrast and form labels first.
- Do not buy an overlay widget. A toolbar promising compliance from one line of JavaScript does not change the page underneath it, and it bills you every month for not changing it.
- If the site is being replaced anyway, do not audit the old one. Put the money into the new build, where the same decisions cost nothing extra.
Questions buyers ask
Am I legally required to make my website accessible?
It depends on what you do and who you sell to. Public sector work carries a direct obligation, and the European Accessibility Act pushes obligations onto consumer facing services such as online shops and ticketing, while treating the smallest businesses more lightly. We build to WCAG 2.2 AA regardless, because that is the standard those rules point at. For your own exposure, ask a lawyer, not a studio.
Will accessibility make the design worse?
No. It removes a few options, in the way a grid or a brand palette removes options. Readable contrast, a visible focus state and type that survives being enlarged are constraints, and constraints are what design is made of.
Can you audit and fix the site I already have?
Yes, scoped as its own piece of work, because we have to see what is there before we can price what it takes. You get a list of what fails, what it affects and what each fix costs, then you decide how much of the list to buy. If the site is close to needing a rebuild, we will say so rather than sell you repairs.
Who owns the result?
You do. The code, the repository and the database are yours, so any developer can pick the site up after us. Hosting is agreed per project, so where the site runs and whose account it sits in is settled with you before launch rather than assumed.
If you want a real number for your own site, tell us what it is and what it has to do, and we will scope it. Start here.
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JP Studio designs and builds websites, storefronts and product interfaces.