How to Scope Accessibility Remediation

Being asked to scope accessibility remediation can feel like a daunting, if not outright impossible, task. You need to provide a clear, realistic plan and budget, but the work often involves layers of technical debt, a game of whack-a-mole with unknown variables, and continuously shifting priorities. It’s almost never as simple as counting pages and multiplying by a flat fee.

This guide will walk you through different methods for scoping accessibility remediation and providing an estimate, helping you decide what will work best for your situation. We’ll cover everything from prerequisites and data gathering, to choosing the method that’s most likely to produce an accurate scope and estimate, based on the type of work that’s being done.

Before You Scope Accessibility: Laying the Groundwork

Before you can even begin scope accessibility remediation, you need a solid foundation. This involves a few key steps that will inform every decision you make moving forward.

Define How You’re Measuring Accessibility

First, determine the standards you’ll use to measure success. For most web projects, this means aligning with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), typically version 2.1 or 2.2, at a specific conformance level (A, AA, or AAA). WCAG 2.1 Level AA is still the most common target for commercial and public-facing websites, although the most recent version at the time of this publication (2.2) is seeing accelerating adoption.

You should also clarify the tools and methods you’ll use for validation. This might include:

• Automated tools (e.g., Accessibility Checker or WAVE) for catching lower level technical issues.
• Manual testing with a keyboard and screen readers (e.g., NVDA or VoiceOver) to evaluate the user experience.
• Expert-led audits from an accessibility specialist, either in-house or via an external partner like us.
• User testing through engaging one more users with disabilities to test user journeys and provide qualitative feedback.

Map Out Everything You Know About the Work

Gather all the existing information about the site or application you’re remediating. This is your chance to get a full picture of the current state.

• Existing Audits: Do you have any prior accessibility audits? Check their age and whether they are still relevant. If an audit is more than ninety days old, the website may have changed significantly since it was completed. Also, determine if the findings are actionable. A generic, high-level report isn’t as useful as one with specific URLs, screenshots, and code examples.
• Expected Coverage: What is the work focused on? Is it a specific component, or page, or the entire theme, or the full site? Get total clarity on where remediation efforts are going to go, and what “good coverage” looks like.
• Technologies in Use: What is the site built with? Identify the content management system (WordPress, Drupal, Webflow, etc.), and any third-party extensions or plugins. Pay close attention to embedded solutions or integrated services where you have less control over the code. This includes things like video players, chat widgets, or payment portals.
• Other Limitations: Will your team have direct access to make fixes? Are there approval layers you will have to jump through? Limits or restrictions imposed on how quickly your team can complete their work can’t always be anticipated, but if there are indicators upfront that delivery will be challenging, you can account for that in scope and estimates.

Eliminate or Prepare for Unknowns

One of the biggest challenges in scoping accessibility remediation is dealing with uncertainty. You can’t provide an accurate estimate for problems you don’t know exist. On the flip side, clients will often expect to get an idea of scope, timeline, and cost before you have perfect knowledge of the situation. Make sure that your scope accounts for unknowns, and gives you the flexibility to ask for more time or more budget should the need arise.

If a client asks to scope remediation before a full accessibility audit has been completed, you should strongly recommend an audit first if they want the most accurate estimate. Depending on the client’s budget, this doesn’t have to be a massive and expensive udnertaking. Even starting with automated accessibility testing can provide a baseline of information and serve as an early indicator as to the full accessibility status of a site. If a website has a large number of accessibility issues detectable via automation, then it likely has an equal or greater number of issues that go beyond surface-level.

Also, be upfront about things you can’t control. Code from third-party embedded solutions often falls into this category, like cookie banners or some page builders. Make a list of these dependencies and consider whether they can be replaced, or if the client needs to address the accessibility of those tools directly with the third-party provider. Make sure your client understands what they reasonably can and can not ask you to fix.

Finally, use public resources like the page builder accessibility report to pinpoint any major technologies at play that could adversely impact accessibility. Do this early. If the customer is using technologies known to add accessibility barriers (e.g., certain legacy builders, plugins, or extensions), look into alternative solutions or add-ons that provide tailored accessibility fixes for those technologies. A remediation plan might include recommending a move to a more accessible technology stack. If you aren’t sure whether a particular piece of technology could be problematic, search for their public accessibility documentation.

Choosing Your Approach for Scoping Accessibility Remediation

Once you have a clear understanding of the project’s foundation, you can choose a scoping approach. The best method depends on the project’s scale, complexity, and how much information is at your disposal ahead of time.

Unique Page or Template Tally

This approach estimates remediation based on the number of unique pages or templates that need to be fixed.

• Best for: Small marketing or brochure websites with relatively simple tech stacks.
• Pros: Easy to quantify and simple for clients to understand.
• Cons: Can’t account for a lot of variability in content or technical complexity.

Component-Based

This method breaks the site down into reusable UI components (e.g., buttons, forms, modals) and scopes the remediation work per component.

• Best for: Projects with a design system or modular setup.
• Pros: Highly value return for inputs. Fix a component once, and if the design system was properly implemented it will be fixed everywhere.
• Cons: Requires a thorough upfront inventory of all components, and doesn’t account for a handful content-specific accessibility issues.

User Journey Based

Here, you focus on the most important user flows, like account creation, a checkout process, or a content consumption path. The scope is defined by addressing accessibility barriers within these key journeys.

• Best for: Projects where user experience, or mitigating the risk of complaints from users is the chief concern.
• Pros: Likely to align with core business goals, and ensures the most critical paths are usable for everyone.
• Cons: Less comprehensive, and can miss accessibility issues on less-frequented pages or in edge use cases.

Issue-Based

This approach scopes remediation by a specific list of issues found in an a formal accessibility audit or evaluation.

• Best for: Projects where some type of formal accessibility evaluation and documentation of issues was already done.
• Pros: Clear, granular scope and a thoroughly itemized plan. Little to no ambiguity.
• Cons: Time consuming to produce this type of estimate, you will likely want to charge a fee for your time. Some customers will not like this.

Estimating Remediation Cost

It’s hard to talk about scope without also talking about estimating the cost of the scope. The two are inextricably tied together, at least to me.

The estimation method you choose should be compatible with the scoping approach, so that both can stand up to heavy scrutiny from a savvy purchaser. Making sure there is alignment here is also a key factor in preventing under-charging and losing money, or over-charging and losing the bid to a competitor.

Below is a breakdown of the four common methods for generating estimates that I’ve had personal experience with, and how they align with the scoping methods we covered in the previous section.

Unit Cost Estimate

This method applies a flat fee to a specific unit of work, such as a page, or component, or an hour of your time.

• How it works: You charge a flat fee multiplied by the number of units.
• Best paired with: Unique Page or Template Tally.
• Pros: Simple and easy for clients to understand.
• Cons: Lacks flexibility, and can lead to under- or over-charging if there is a lot of variation within each individual unit.

Bottom-Up Estimate

This is the most detailed and accurate method. It requires exhaustively itemizing every single task or deliverable component, and estimating the individual cost of each.

• How it works: You create a detailed list of every single thing you’re going to do or fix, and assign each item on the list an individual price.
• Best paired with: Issue-Based.
• Pros: Extremely accurate if prepared by a skilled professional.
• Cons: Very time-consuming to prepare and requires a full accounting of scope upfront with little to no allowance for ambiguity.

Analogous Estimate

This method uses historical data from similar projects to provide an estimate.

• How it works: You use data from past projects to create a fixed price for an “average” or “typical” project of the exact same type.
• Best paired with: User Journey Based.
• Pros: You can estimate much faster if you have extensive experience with a specific, narrowly defined type of project.
• Cons: Can be unreliable if the projects you’re working on vary a lot.

Parametric Estimate

This method starts with a base unit cost and then applies a number of variables to adjust the unit cost up or down, to account for different situations.

• How it works: You use a formula with a base unit rate and a series of variables to create a customized estimate.
• Best paired with: Unique Page/Template Tally or Component-Based.
• Pros: Allows for quick but also reasonably accurate estimates, even without a perfect level of information. It accounts for risk factors in a more sophisticated way than a simple unit cost.
• Cons: It takes time, and trial and error to tweak the formulas to ensure they are reasonably accurate.

Which Methods Work Best?

The unhelpful but true answer is: It depends.

For those looking for a TL;DR (too long, didn’t read) summary, here are the steps you need to follow:

1. Define how accessibility is being measured
2. Map out what you know: Existing audits, technologies in play, and any limitations.
3. Either eliminate or do your best to prepare for unknowns.
4. Scope in a way that makes sense for the type of project you’re doing and what information is at your disposal.
5. Prepare an estimate using a method that complements your scoping approach.

Here are some examples:

If thirty five departmental websites at a university were all using the same inaccessible home page template and needed to get it fixed, a Page/Template Tally combined with a Unit Cost Estimate is a great fit. The work is predictable with little to no variation because all the home pages are using the same template, so the pricing can be simple.

If you were handed a complete WCAG 2.2 AA audit of a financial institution’s corporate blog, Issue-Based scoping with a Bottom-Up Estimate is going to provide the most accurate quote, and leaves no room for questions as to how you arrived at the price.

If you maintain a portfolio of 50 winery websites that all use the same inaccessible checkout flow, and you’ve fixed the first two and need to estimate the other 48, User Journey Based scoping with an Analogous Estimate based on how long it took to do the first two sites, allows you to be fast without sacrificing confidence.

If you have limited information about a website and need to scope remediation for it to help with early-stage planning, a Parametric Estimate paired with Page/Template Tally or Component-Based scoping is your best bet. You can adjust the base unit cost up or down based on whether surface-level checks show a lot of accessibility issues, and how the technologies in use on the site might help or hinder remediation efforts.

Need help scoping accessibility remediation?

We frequently partner with agencies, freelancers, and other organizations to help them deliver better accessibility solutions.

Contact us for early-stage advice and estimates at no cost. 👈