Every agency owner and freelancer knows the electric feeling of the day a website project crosses the finish line and launches. Imagine you’re there, and you’re launching your first (or next) fully accessible build.
Then, you hand over the keys.
Now, fast forward six months. The client’s marketing team has uploaded fifty new blog posts with every single image missing alt text. A plugin update broke the keyboard navigation on the main contact and newsletter registration forms. And the cherry on top: A third-party cookie compliance script injected an unlabelled modal that traps screen reader users in an endless loop.
The site is no longer accessible. The investment made in launching accessible is eroding, and the client’s liability risk is creeping back up. This all to familiar scenario highlights the single greatest misconception about accessibility:
The myth that accessibility is a project with a finish line.
Accessibility is not a checkbox. If you are going to deliver and sustain it, it has to be part of continuous program. Digital properties are living, breathing entities that change constantly. For agencies looking to escape the feast-or-famine cycle of project work and provide genuine, long-term value to clients, the solution is clear.
It’s time to productize and prioritize Accessibility Maintenance Plans.
Defining Accessibility Maintenance Plans
There is often confusion about where remediation ends and maintenance begins. An Accessibility Maintenance Plan is a retainer-based, recurring service designed to keep a digital property compliant, usable, and accessible after the initial build or remediation is complete.
The primary goals of any maintenance plan are:
- Detection – Identifying new issues that are getting introduced.
- Response – Fixing issues that inevitably slip through the cracks.
- Prevention – Shoring up faltering systems and plugging visible leaks.
For a WordPress agency, this is the bridge between being a “vendor who built the site” and a “partner who ensures the site succeeds.” To fully understand the value, we need to distinguish maintenance from the other accessibility services you might already offer.
Accessibility Maintenance vs. Audits
Think of an accessibility audit as a comprehensive medical physical or a home inspection. It is a snapshot in time. It tells you exactly what is wrong right now. It is a diagnostic tool used to create a roadmap for fixes. An audit is essential, but it has a shelf life. The moment the client publishes a new landing page or you push a theme update, that audit report becomes historical data.
Maintenance is the health regimen that follows the physical. It is the daily diet and exercise that prevents the health issues from returning. While an audit diagnoses the illness, maintenance preserves the health.
Accessibility Maintenance vs. Remediation
Remediation is the heavy lift after the audit. It involves deep code refactoring, design changes, and significant hours to bring a non-conformant site up to standards. It is often expensive and time consuming if it involves refactoring something that was already built (where accessibility wasn’t originally considered, or was not maintained for a lengthy period).
Maintenance is the physical therapy. It is the lighter, ongoing effort to keep the system functional and performing optimally. When an agency offers maintenance, they are essentially protecting the client’s investment in remediation. Without maintenance, the site will eventually degrade back to a state requiring another expensive remediation project. Maintenance keeps accessibility debt at (or close to) zero.
Accessibility Maintenance vs. Pure Monitoring
This is the most common point of confusion. Many agencies subscribe to automated scanning tools and resell the reporting to the client. Monitoring is incredibly important, but at the end of the day it’s just the alarm system. They’re sending an alert saying, “Hey, you have problems!”
Maintenance takes this, and adds in the actual fix. A true Accessibility Maintenance Plan moves from reporting to action. The maintenance includes:
- Interpreting the scan results
- Perform manual spot checks (because automated tools don’t catch everything)
- Actually fix the code or content that has a deficiency
Monitoring is data, which is great.
Maintenance is the data + the necessary response to that data.
The Agency Perspective on Accessibility Maintenance Plans
Why should your agency undertake the effort of structuring and selling these plans? Beyond the moral imperative of building a more inclusive internet for all of us, the business case for agencies is undeniable.
Predictable, Recurring Revenue
The “Revenue Rollercoaster” is the bane of agency existence. You land a huge build, cash flow is great for three months, and then you scramble for the next lead. Accessibility Maintenance Plans build Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR).
By shifting from a purely transactional model to a retainer model, you stabilize your cash flow. If you have 20 clients on a maintenance plan, you start every month with a baseline of revenue that covers your overhead. This financial predictability allows you to hire better talent, invest in better tools, and grow your business.
Perhaps most importantly: It gives you time. Time to rebuild a faltering sales pipeline. Time to recover after a major contract falls through (because you have revenue to fall back on). Time to weather uncertainty in the economy or the industry you work in.
Deeper Client Relationships
When you only do builds or one-off audits and remediation, you are a replaceable vendor. Once the invoice is paid, the relationship often pauses until they need something else.
When you offer maintenance, you become a strategic partner.
Maintaining accessibility requires ongoing communication. You are reporting to them every few weeks or months. You are catching issues before they become real headaches. You are demonstrating that you care about their long-term success. This deepens trust and increases the “stickiness” of the client. Clients are far less likely to churn or look for a new agency when you are actively managing one (or a multitude) of facets of their digital presence.
Mitigating Liability
Agencies often worry about the liability of promising accessibility. “What if we miss something?”
However, the risk is actually higher when you don’t offer maintenance. If you launch an accessible site and the client breaks it a month later, and then gets sued, they may look back at you and ask, “Why didn’t you tell us this could happen?”
By offering a maintenance plan, you are proactively helping the client mitigate their legal risk. You are positioning your agency as the expert who understands that accessibility is a journey. It reflects positively on your expertise and protects your reputation as a builder of high-quality digital products.
Efficiency and Scalability
From an operational standpoint, maintenance is far more efficient than auditing and remediating a site every few years.
Fixing a single accessibility issue in the code and informing the person who make the breaking change of their mistake so it won’t happen again, might take 30 minutes. Fixing that individual code issue, plus 50 other identical issues because the same mistake was repeated across dozens of new pieces of content, plus a broken navigation menu, plus 200 missing alt tags after two years of neglect is a massive, stressful project.
Maintenance allows for batching and prioritization. It keeps the work manageable. And it’s often less stressful for everyone. Your team can allocate specific hours per month to check, fix, report, and prevent, rather than pulling “all-nighters” to meet a remediation deadline.
The Client Perspective on Accessibility Maintenance Plans
We know why agencies need to offer them. But how do you sell them? What is the value proposition for the client? When pitching these plans, focus on these four pillars of value.
Legal and Brand Risk Mitigation
Fear might be a short-term a motivator, but “peace of mind” is the real product. In the US, lawsuits regarding digital accessibility are rising year over year. In Europe, the European Accessibility Act (EAA) creates binding legal requirements that went into full effect in June 2025.
Clients need to understand that a one-time fix does not inoculate them from lawsuits, fines, and other regulatory consequences forever. If a user with a disability encounters a barrier today, it doesn’t matter that the site was deemed compliant last year.
A maintenance plan minimizes the chance of a brand-denting public complaint or legal threat. More importantly, having a documented history that proves ongoing maintenance and a roadmap for fixes serves as a strong defense that the organization is taking proactive measures. Sustained conformance equals sustained peace of mind.
Consistent, High Quality UX
Accessibility is, at its core, about user experience (UX) and putting quality first.
When a client pays for maintenance, they aren’t just paying for accessibility; they are paying for a consistently superior user experience. They are ensuring that the 20% of the population with disabilities, and the billions of aging internet users, can always use their website or digital product(s).
This maximizes market reach. It ensures that no potential customer is blocked from making a purchase or filling out a contact form. This is a direct line to Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO).
Cost-Effectiveness
This is the “Oil Change vs. Engine Replacement” argument. It is dramatically cheaper to pay a monthly fee to fix small issues in real-time than it is to pay for a massive overhaul project every two years.
Without maintenance, sites accumulate “Accessibility Debt.” Like financial debt, this debt compounds. The longer issues are left unaddressed, the more expensive and difficult they become to untangle. A maintenance plan flattens the spending curve, turning a massive, unpredictable budget bomb into a predictable, manageable operating expense.
Team Education and Enablement
Perhaps the most underrated benefit of a maintenance plan is the educational component. Digital properties often break because well-meaning content editors don’t know the rules. They upload a flyer as an image without alt text. They use bold text instead of a proper heading structure.
A robust maintenance plan should include a feedback loop. When the agency finds themselves fixing the same error repeatedly, they can inform the client: “We noticed the recent blog posts skipped heading levels. Here is a quick video showing your team how to select H2s and H3s in the WordPress editor.”
By inserting highly targeted “micro trainings” on accessibility within the client’s workflows, you can prevent future errors and improve resiliency against future accessibility regressions, making the client feel empowered in the process.
Accessibility and the Continuous Improvement (CI) Model
The smartest agencies are moving away from selling “Websites” and starting to sell living, breathing “Continuous Improvement” plans where a website isn’t treated as a static one-off deliverable, but something that can morph and change over time.
Historically, agencies have offered CI packages for things like Security, Performance, and SEO or (or more recently) AIO. Accessibility fits perfectly into this framework. In fact, in a sense it can serve as the glue that holds many of these things together.
Integrating Accessibility into CI
You don’t need to sell Accessibility Maintenance as a strange, standalone add-on. And honestly, if you do that, many of your customers (particularly if they are small or mid-sized businesses) might not go for it. As much as we might wish it were otherwise, accessibility very much is not in the “vocabulary” of most clients, even digitally savvy ones.
Instead, agencies should roll it into their broader care plans because it supports every other metric your client cares about.
- Performance: Accessibility fixes often result in cleaner, semantic HTML and streamlined code. Less bloat means faster load times. And faster load times feed into the next two items in a big way.
- SEO & AIO: Google’s search crawler is, effectively, a screen reader. And the way AI parses content isn’t that much different. These systems will parse code to understand context. Semantic HTML, descriptive link text, proper heading structures, and alt text are foundational accessibility requirements. They are also foundational to helping machines understand and index your content.
- Conversion Optimization: An accessible website is a website that converts better. It’s simple math: If a greater percentage of users can use a site, it will have more conversions. High contrast buttons are clicked more often. Clear focus and error states reduce user confusion.
Accessibility Maintenance Plans aren’t an “extra cost” for a niche group.
They are a critical, foundational component of any modern Continuous Improvement offering. You cannot claim to offer maintenance if you are ignoring the usability of the site for potentially one fifth of its entire potential user base.
Agencies, what are you waiting for?
The demand for digital accessibility is growing. The legal requirements are tightening. The technology is evolving.
If you are an agency owner or a freelancer, relying solely on “build and launch” projects is a recipe for burnout and unstable revenue. It also does a disservice to your clients, leaving them vulnerable to the inevitable decay of their digital products.
By offering Accessibility Maintenance Plans (or working accessibility meaningfully into your existing CI offerings), you differentiate your agency in a crowded market. You move yourself out of the “commodity” box. You secure your bottom line while simultaneously helping your customer unlock real results, and making the web a more inclusive place.
Ready to elevate your agency’s accessibility offering?
We know that getting started with accessibility can be daunting. You might feel you don’t have the deep technical expertise in-house to handle complex audits or heavy remediation.
That is where we come in.
Learn more about how we partner with agencies. Let us be your technical accessibility back-office, enabling you to build profitable, long-term relationships with your clients. We specialize in the heavy lifting: The audits, the strategy, and the remediation consulting. So you can confidently sell and deliver the ongoing accessibility maintenance your clients need.
