What Does It Cost to Make a Website Accessible?

Accessibility has gone from a recommendation to a requirement. The European Accessibility Act (EAA) has applied to e-commerce and a range of consumer services since June 2025, and enforcement is tightening during 2026. The question most people ask is simple: what does it cost to make a site WCAG-accessible? The answer starts with an audit – but the final bill is decided by how your existing site is built.

Does the requirement apply to you?

Before you budget, it’s worth knowing whether you’re actually covered. The accessibility directive targets consumer-facing digital services: e-commerce, banking services, ticket sales, e-books, and a range of other areas aimed at private individuals. If you sell goods or services to consumers via a website or app, the starting assumption is that you’re covered.

The public sector has also had its own accessibility requirements for some time, through the law on accessibility of digital public services. What’s new is that the requirements now reach private operators across the board. Pure information sites for smaller companies can still fall outside the scope, but the line isn’t always obvious – and since enforcement is tightening during 2026, a quick check on whether your service is covered is often time well spent. Guessing wrong in either direction is costly: either you build away a requirement unnecessarily, or you miss one that applies.

Step one: the audit

Once you know the requirement applies, you need to know what’s wrong. A professional audit against WCAG 2.1/2.2 level AA usually lands at SEK 50,000–150,000. The range is driven by the site’s size – the number of unique page templates and flows matters more than the number of pages – and by how much is tested manually with assistive technology like screen readers.

An audit typically combines automated tools with manual testing. Automated tools catch some things, like missing alt text and clear contrast failures, but they miss what requires human judgment: whether the keyboard order is logical, whether error messages are understandable, whether a screen reader reads the page coherently. It’s the manual part that costs the most – and that gives the prioritized list its real value.

The result is exactly that: a prioritized list of which gaps are critical, which are easy to fix, and which need more work. Without that list, any remediation budget is a guess.

Step two: remediation depends on your technical debt

There’s no one-size-fits-all price tag here, and it’s important to understand why. The remediation cost depends almost entirely on how much technical debt the site carries.

• A modern, well-built site with thoughtful components often needs only adjustments: contrast, labels, focus order. That can mean just a few weeks of work.
• An older platform with cobbled-together third-party parts and inline solutions may need to be rebuilt from the ground up just to become accessible at all. At that point, the cost approaches a partial rebuild.

In other words: two sites that look the same on the surface can differ by a factor of ten or more in remediation cost. It’s the debt under the surface that decides.

The three most common gaps

Regardless of industry, the same three gaps come up in almost every audit:

1. Color contrast. Light gray text on a white background, or colored buttons with too weak a contrast, make content unreadable for many people. It’s the single most common finding – and often one of the cheapest to fix.
2. Keyboard navigation. Everything should work without a mouse. Menus, modals, and custom-built components that only respond to clicks shut out anyone navigating with a keyboard or assistive technology.
3. Forms. Fields without associated labels, error messages shown only with color, and required fields that aren’t announced to screen readers. Forms are often where the business happens, which makes these gaps especially costly.

A worked example

Say you run an e-commerce site and an audit reveals moderate debt: contrast issues throughout the design, a couple of inaccessible forms, and a menu that doesn’t work with a keyboard. Budget around SEK 100,000 for the audit plus a few weeks of development time for fixes. If the audit instead shows that the checkout flow runs on an old third-party solution that has to be replaced, the fixes can become a substantial line item on their own. The point: you don’t know until the audit is done, which is why it comes first.

Cheapest: build it right from the start

By far the cheapest accessibility is the kind you never have to retrofit. In a new build, WCAG compliance rarely costs more than a few percent extra – the right components, a color palette with approved contrasts, and semantic code get baked in from the start instead of being ripped up later.

At Weapp we build accessibility in as a natural part of our web services rather than a separate track, precisely because after-the-fact fixes are almost always more expensive. Planning a new site, or want to know how much technical debt you’re carrying? Get in touch and we’ll look at an approach that fits your timeline ahead of 2026.