Design Domination Podcast Episode #198: How to Price Accessibility Services: A Complete Guide for Consultants

Music: https://www.bensound.com

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Are you struggling to price accessibility work? Are you undercharging for accessibility work? If so, this is for you.

I recently asked my e-mail subscribers what burning accessibility questions they had. The question I got over and over again was “how do I price accessibility work?”

So today I am going to explain different pricing options for accessibility services, what to take into consideration when pricing different types of accessibility work and how I price my own accessibility consulting services.

Stick around to get tons of tips to not just help you price your accessibility work but also price it profitably, because I know it can be hard to estimate all that you need to and then you end up not being profitable with the project. That defeats the purpose of taking on the project to begin with!

Common Pricing Models for Accessibility Services

First off, let’s talk different pricing options, because there are so many ways you could potentially charge for your accessibility services. There’s:

• hourly pricing (hourly rates);
• day rates, where you charge for a half-day, full day or maybe a couple of days at a certain rate;
• per-page pricing; and
• flat-rate pricing, which could also include package pricing.

What to Consider When Pricing Accessibility Work

For any accessibility projects, I always take a look at the content. I look at things like:

• approximately how many images might need Alt-text, and whether I or the client will be writing the Alt-text;
• if there are complex images that will require special treatment;
• how many infographics I might need to remediate or create;
• how many tables there are;
• if there any footnotes or endnotes;
• the number of forms to be remediated or created;
• if there are any other languages in the content;
• for websites, if captions and transcripts need to be created, and whether or not the client or I will be the one creating them.

No matter which way you charge, these are all important factors to consider when pricing any accessibility work. They are going to impact the time involved.

What to Charge for Accessible Document or Website Design

If you’ve listened to my podcast for some time or if you know who Jonathan Stark is, then you know hourly pricing is the worst way to charge, at least for any creative work.

It only considers your time, not your expertise or the value of your work. And accessibility is a specialized skill that is hard to find in designers. So clients should expect to pay more for that skill.

It shouldn’t cost a client more if it takes you, say, a couple weeks instead of a couple days, to come up with a design. And you shouldn’t charge less if it only takes you a few hours or a day.

So if I am doing any accessible design work, such as a report design, website design or an accessible infographic, I would charge a flat rate for that.

Both are going to require other work, such as laying out the report if it’s a document, or creating pages and adding content if it’s a website. I would charge differently and additionally for that type of work.

So I would say, OK, the design portion is this much. How many pages am I going to be dealing with?

For documents that I’ll be laying out, I use a standard word count of 250 words to figure out the number of pages. This gives me a baseline for how much content there is, especially since I don’t know how many pages the final layout file may end up. I don’t just go by the number of pages in a client’s Word document because the page size, text size and margin sizes a client uses when laying out the copy are always different.

Measuring 250 words as a page means I am consistent. So, for example, a 2,500-word document would be 10 pages. I don’t care if it ends up being 8 pages or 12 pages laid out. That’s OK.

So then I would figure out a per-page rate and add that to the design portion.

By the way, I still present this as a flat rate to clients. This is just the formula I use to figure out what I am going to charge for the project.

What to Charge for Document Remediation or Website Remediation Work

If I am remediating an existing document or website (also called “accessibility remediation”), I will take all of those things I mentioned earlier into consideration.

I will also take into account the state of the current document or website and how much time I think it will take to remediate what’s there.

I might calculate a day rate, per-page rate or hourly rate but still present it as a flat rate, but a range. So it might be “I estimate this to be $2,000 to $2,500,” for example.

I would not tell a client it will be this much per page.

By the way, I don’t love per-page pricing for remediation work, whether it’s a document or a web page, because not all pages are equal.

One page could be mostly text. Another page could have lots of text and a complex table. Yet another could have text and a lot of images.

One page might take you 2 minutes, another 15 minutes and another a half hour.

Whether it’s document or website remediation, I have sometimes gone through and said, OK, about this percent of the pages are simple, this many are in the middle in terms of complexity, and this many pages are really complex and then give them a price per page, assigning simple pages a lower rate and complex pages a higher one.

But I would still put a flat rate or a range in my estimate.

You could potentially charge a day rate for remediation work.

Instead of figuring out how many hours something will take, figure out how many days the work will take and go from there. I think this will take a half-day, 1 day, 2 days or whatever. Figure out what your day rate will be and do the math and be done.

I presented the day rate option to a client who needed some accessibility work done, pretty much taking content from multiple accessible documents we had worked on and creating a new accessible document from that.

I explained the whole day rate thing and they loved the idea, because it meant they’d get the work done faster and with no distractions, because they would be available in case I had any questions. And I am sure you can understand that it can be hard to get back into a project after waiting on a client to get you content. Then you’re like, where was I?? It’s a time suck!

I talked to the queen of day rates, Sarah Masci, on the podcast. She gave so much great information about day rates, so definitely check that out.

What to Charge for Website Accessibility Audits

For website accessibility audits (sometimes called “WCAG audits” or “accessibility testing”), I’ve charged—and I’ve talked to colleagues who charge this way too… I’ve charged a flat rate for auditing the home page. It’s usually one of the most complex pages on a site. Auditing that will also cover the header and footer.

Then I’ve charged a per-page rate for other pages on the site.

I have always gone in and selected pages that give a good variety of content, such as:

• the Contact page, because that usually has a form;
• a page that has images;
• a page that has a complex graphic, such as a map;
• a page with a video;
• a page with a table, etc.

I then present my estimate to the client as a flat rate but based on the combined home page plus per-page rate multiplied by how many pages being audited.

For example, I might say the home page is this much (I’ll just say $500 to make the math easy) and then each page after that is $150 and there are 10. So that’s $500 + $1,500, for a total of $2,000.

You could potentially charge a day rate for website accessibility audits. Figure out how many days you think it will take you times whatever your day rate is.

What to Charge for Accessible Website Maintenance

For accessible website maintenance (ongoing accessibility support), I’ve charged package pricing, a monthly fee.

It’s key to clearly define the scope though. You don’t want it to be a free-for-all. So you’ll get this for x price. Anything else will be additional at such-and-such rate.

The scope could be a set list of tasks or a certain amount of time for support every month.

If you’re not charging monthly and doing the work on an as-needed basis instead, then you could charge a day rate for the work. One time that might be half a day, maybe another time it will take a full day.

What to Charge for Accessibility Advising

If you do any accessibility advising or accessibility consulting, where you are not executing the work but you’re the one advising what to do and also maybe checking another contractor’s work, then you could potentially charge a flat rate, day rate or hourly.

If you decide on hourly, however, I suggest charging a higher hourly rate than if you were the one doing the work. That is because it’s higher level, meaning there is increased value. Even though the person you’re advising won’t be learning enough to be able to go and do the work on their own in the future, they are still getting some benefit—learning—in addition to executing the work properly.

I have some students who’ve gone through my Foundations of Website Accessibility course who are not web designers or developers. They actually took the course so they could advise web designers and developers on designing and building accessible websites.

Many times, I myself have advised other freelance or agency designers on their design work to make sure it was accessible.

So those are some examples of accessibility advising. Charge accordingly!

How Much Should You Charge for Accessibility Work

Now how much you should charge for accessibility work depends on several factors:

• your skill level and experience;
• the level of WCAG conformance (for example, you would want to charge more for WCAG AAA rather than AA conformance, because there is more work involved);
• complexity of the project;
• your geographic location;
• the deadline;
• the size of the client.

I hope this was helpful to you. Once you figure out different types of pricing models (how much you need to charge hourly, per day, etc.), then it will make it much easier and faster to price accessibility projects more profitably going forward.