What e-commerce accessibility monitoring costs and what you get for it
The accessibility tooling market has three distinct price bands, each with a different model and a different set of trade-offs. Understanding what you are actually buying at each level makes it easier to decide where the spending makes sense for your specific situation.
The three price bands
Overlay widgets ($49 to $99/month): Products in this category, including accessiBe, UserWay, and AudioEye, insert a JavaScript widget into your site that attempts to modify the accessibility tree at runtime. They market themselves as one-line, instant compliance solutions. The FTC reached a $1M settlement with accessiBe in 2025 related to deceptive accessibility claims. Independent testing shows that overlay scripts frequently break keyboard navigation and screen reader compatibility rather than fixing them, because they try to rewrite what the browser has already built from your HTML. Courts have not treated overlay installation as a valid ADA defense. We do not sell overlays and would not recommend installing one.
Manual expert audits ($3,000 to $25,000+ one-time): A trained tester, often a screen reader user themselves, navigates your site manually to find issues that automated tools cannot detect: whether focus order makes logical sense, whether complex interactive patterns are navigable in a coherent sequence, whether alt text is accurate rather than just present. Manual audits produce the most thorough findings. They do not produce ongoing results. A manual audit tells you where your site was on the day the tester ran it; it says nothing about where your site will be after the next theme update or content deployment.
Automated scanning ($249 to $590/month, or $490 one-time): A crawler visits your pages and runs an accessibility ruleset (we use axe-core, the same engine that powers the axe DevTools browser extension) against the rendered HTML. This category catches a specific class of issues reliably: missing image alt text, unlabeled form fields and buttons, color contrast failures, and ARIA implementation errors. It does not catch everything a manual tester would find. It does produce results that can be run on a regular cadence and compared against a baseline to detect regressions.
What you get from a baseline audit
A baseline audit is a one-time scan of your site's pages, producing a prioritized report of every issue the scanner finds. Each finding includes:
- The specific page and the location in the HTML where the issue appears
- The WCAG rule it violates (with the criterion reference, e.g. "WCAG 2.1 SC 1.1.1 Non-text Content")
- The severity level: critical, serious, moderate, or minor
- The element selector so a developer can find it in the source
- A description of what the fix looks like
The output is a working document for a developer. It tells them exactly what to change, not just that there is a problem. A developer can typically work through the critical and serious findings from a baseline audit in a few days, depending on the site's structure and how many distinct component types are affected.
Our baseline audit covers up to 200 pages and costs $490 as a one-time purchase.
What ongoing monitoring adds
The gap in a one-time audit is what happens next. A Shopify store receives platform updates from Shopify. Themes receive updates from theme developers. Marketing teams deploy new banner templates, seasonal landing pages, and promotional overlays. Any of these can introduce new accessibility failures without anyone noticing, because there is no automatic check comparing the site today against the site yesterday.
Monthly monitoring rescans your site on a defined schedule and produces a diff report: issues that were present before and have since been fixed (good), issues that were present before and are still present (still needs attention), and issues that were not present before but are now (regression from a recent change). The diff report is the specific value of monitoring over a one-time audit. It tells you when something you fixed has been re-broken and when a new deployment has introduced something new.
The Monitor plan covers up to 50 pages with monthly scans and diff reports for $249/month. The Pro plan covers up to 200 pages with weekly scans, more detailed code-level fix guidance, and agency-formatted reports for $590/month.
| Option | Typical cost | Frequency | What it covers |
|---|---|---|---|
| Overlay widget | $49-$99/mo | Real-time (runtime patch) | Attempts to patch the live accessibility tree; does not fix underlying HTML; can break existing screen reader support |
| Manual expert audit | $3,000-$25,000+ | One-time (point-in-time) | Comprehensive: covers issues automated tools miss, including navigation logic and screen reader UX; produces a VPAT or conformance report |
| BarrierScan Baseline Audit | $490 one-time | One-time (point-in-time) | Automated scan of up to 200 pages; critical and serious issues with developer-ready fix guidance; honest scope (not a full VPAT) |
| BarrierScan Monitor | $249/mo | Monthly scans + diff reports | Automated scan of up to 50 pages; regression detection; diff report showing what changed vs. prior scan |
| BarrierScan Pro | $590/mo | Weekly scans + diff reports | Automated scan of up to 200 pages; weekly cadence; detailed code-level fix guidance; agency-formatted reports |
What automated scanning does not cover
We are direct about scope because the alternative is selling something that does not deliver what the name implies. Automated scanning, including ours, does not produce a WCAG conformance certification, a VPAT, or a legal opinion about ADA compliance. WCAG 2.1 AA covers a broader scope than any automated tool can reach. Published research puts the proportion of WCAG issues detectable by automated scanning at roughly 30 to 57 percent of all issue types.
What automated scanning does catch reliably are the issues that appear most frequently in ADA web cases against e-commerce sites: missing image alt text, unlabeled buttons and form fields, color contrast failures, and ARIA implementation errors. These are also the issues that are most fixable at the HTML level with clear, specific guidance.
If you need a VPAT for a procurement process, or a comprehensive conformance report for legal purposes, a manual expert audit is the right tool. We can point you toward qualified auditors if that is what you need. If you need to know where your store stands on the most common issues and get ongoing detection when deployments introduce regressions, that is what monitoring covers.
How to think about the value
The business case for accessibility monitoring comes down to four considerations:
Customer reach: Roughly 1 in 4 US adults has some form of disability. Screen reader users, keyboard-only users, and users with low vision or color blindness are all potential customers who may currently be unable to complete a purchase on your site because of issues you have not identified. Fixing those issues expands the pool of people who can actually buy from you.
Code quality and SEO: Most accessibility failures are HTML structure issues. A form field with a missing label is not just inaccessible; it is also harder to parse for search crawlers and more brittle to maintain. Fixing accessibility problems tends to produce cleaner markup with measurable downstream benefits.
Regulatory context: The ADA has been applied to websites since the DOJ issued formal guidance in March 2022 confirming that commercial websites are places of public accommodation under Title III. The EU Accessibility Act went into effect June 28, 2025 and applies to US-based sellers who serve EU customers. Neither creates a guarantee that fixing accessibility issues eliminates legal exposure, but both create a context where documented, ongoing improvement is the defensible position.
Regression prevention: The cost of ongoing monitoring is predictable and low compared to the cost of re-auditing a site that has drifted over 12 months of deployments. If your developer fixed 20 issues in March and you have no monitoring in place, you have no way to know whether those 20 issues are still fixed in December. Monthly scanning answers that question automatically.
Starting point
The free homepage scan shows you the critical and serious issues on your main page in about 60 seconds, with no account required. If the homepage has significant findings, a full baseline audit across your product and checkout pages gives you the complete picture and a remediation list your developer can work from. From there, ongoing monitoring keeps the baseline from drifting.