🎯 The business: you test websites, online forms and PDFs the way people with disabilities use them: keyboard only, with a screen reader, zoomed in, with color contrast measured. You check them against WCAG, the international accessibility guidelines, write a clear report of what fails and how to fix it, then fix it yourself or retest the developer’s fixes. Online shops, clinics, colleges, towns and web agencies pay, pushed by lawsuits and by federal deadlines in 2027 and 2028.
At a glance
| Money to start | ≈ $100 to $2,450 |
| Time to the first paid job | 1 to 3 months, including learning time |
| Hours a week | 8 to 15 part time; 20 or more with agency partners |
| Skills that matter most | WCAG 2.1 and 2.2, screen reader and keyboard testing, reading HTML, writing fixes developers can follow |
| What it can pay | About $5,500 a month before tax with two audits and steady fix work, about a year in (worked below) |
Is this for you?
It suits someone careful and fair-minded who likes finding exactly why something breaks. Computer science and information science students do well, but plenty of auditors came from design, writing or teaching. You must be willing to learn a screen reader properly, which takes a few weeks of daily practice.
It is a poor fit if you want quick, vague jobs. Clients rely on your report, sometimes in a legal dispute, so every finding has to be accurate and reproducible.
AI helps but does not replace you. Automated checkers and AI tools find many surface errors fast, but they cannot tell whether a page makes sense to someone using it by ear or by keyboard. The FTC made that point in money: in January 2025 it charged accessiBe, which sold an AI "overlay" widget, with claiming the tool could make any website WCAG-compliant, and in April 2025 it finalized an order requiring the company to pay $1 million and stop making such claims without evidence.
Who pays, and what
Five kinds of buyers. Online shops and restaurants with ordering, who face most of the lawsuits. Clinics, dental offices and hospitals. Towns, counties, school districts and special districts, now on federal deadlines. Colleges and universities. And web agencies, who are asked about accessibility by their clients and need a tester they can bring in.
The pressure is real. Plaintiffs filed 3,117 website accessibility lawsuits in federal court in 2025, up 27% from 2024 and 36% of all ADA Title III suits, according to the law firm Seyfarth Shaw, which tracks them; state-court suits and demand letters come on top. And the problems are everywhere: the 2026 WebAIM Million scan of the top million home pages found detectable WCAG failures on 95.9% of them, an average of 56 errors a page.
What they pay, as estimates: $500 to $5,000 for an audit depending on size, plus hourly fix work and monthly retesting. Agencies often want a set per-page or per-template price they can resell.
What it takes to start
| Sole proprietor or LLC setup, local business license | $50 to $500 |
| Testing tools: NVDA (free Windows screen reader), VoiceOver (built into Mac and iPhone), TalkBack (Android), WAVE and axe browser checkers | $0 |
| A used phone of the other kind for mobile screen reader testing | $0 to $300 |
| Paid course and an optional certification exam (an estimate; check IAAP’s current fees) | $0 to $600 |
| Errors and omissions insurance, important here (an estimate; get quotes) | $0 to $900 first payment |
| Website and domain | $50 to $150 |
| All-in | ≈ $100 to $2,450 |
Start to finish: the steps
1. Check that you may be paid. International students on F-1 visas generally cannot freelance for outside clients without authorization; ask your international student office first. Some universities hire student accessibility testers on campus, which can be the legal way in.
2. Learn the standard and the tools. Work through the W3C’s free WCAG materials and learn what each Level A and AA success criterion means in practice. Use NVDA with a browser every day for a month, then VoiceOver on a phone. Optional later: IAAP’s certifications (CPACC for the basics, WAS for technical testing) help with agencies and governments.
3. Practice on real sites. Audit ten public sites for yourself, including one of each kind you want to sell to. Write full reports. Volunteer one audit for a local nonprofit and ask permission to use it as a sample, with details removed.
4. Make it legal and insured. Register the business, get the local license and buy errors and omissions insurance, because a client facing a lawsuit may look for someone to blame. Use a contract that states the standard (for example, WCAG 2.1 AA), the pages and flows tested, the tools, the test date, and that you are not giving legal advice. See Contracts, client data and AI rules and Business insurance.
5. Build one repeatable test method. Automated scan first, then a person checks what scanners cannot, shown below. Test the main templates and the most important task, such as checkout, booking or paying a water bill, not every page.
6. Write reports developers can act on. For each issue: where it is, which WCAG criterion it fails, who it affects, how to reproduce it, a suggested fix with code, and a priority. Start with a one-page summary in plain words for the owner.
7. Use AI carefully. AI can draft alt text, suggest code fixes and summarize findings. Check every line; AI often writes alt text that describes the wrong thing or misses the point of the image. Do not paste client code or data into consumer AI accounts without the client’s agreement.
8. Fix, or retest the fixes. Small clients want you to fix the problems too. Agencies want you to retest their developers’ fixes. Price both. Always retest before you call an issue closed.
9. Sell monitoring. Sites change every week and new problems creep in. A monthly plan of scans, a manual spot check of new pages and a short report keeps you in the client’s budget.
10. Specialize and grow. PDFs and documents for governments, checkout flows for online shops, or patient portals for clinics. Partner with two or three agencies, and later hire testers, including testers who use assistive technology every day, whose findings carry weight with clients.
Pricing
| Quick review: 5 key pages, short report | $400 to $900 |
| Full audit, small site: main templates plus one key task flow | $1,500 to $5,000 |
| PDF and document fixes, by length and complexity | $8 to $25 a page |
| Fix work or retesting | $75 to $150 an hour |
| Monthly monitoring and retest plan | $150 to $500 a month |
These are example prices; our research estimate for audits is $500 to $5,000. Quote by templates and task flows, not by every page. Describe results as "conformance with WCAG 2.1 AA on the pages tested, on the date tested", never as "ADA compliant" or "lawsuit-proof". More in Pricing AI and IT services.
The math
Take a solo auditor about a year in with two agency partners. Two small audits at $2,000 bring in $4,000. Ten hours of fix work at $100 add $1,000. Three monitoring plans at $250 add $750. That is $5,750. Costs are about $80 set aside for insurance, $50 for tools and subscriptions, $100 for marketing and events, and $20 for AI: $250. That leaves about $5,500 before tax for roughly 90 hours of work in the month (50 on audits, 10 on fixes, 12 on monitoring, 18 on sales and admin), or about 21 hours a week.
Your first months will be slower while you learn and build samples. Set aside a quarter to a third of profit for income and self-employment tax. See Small business taxes.
Getting customers
Who to approach first. Web agencies and freelance developers. Their clients ask about accessibility, they rarely have a trained tester, and one agency can send you a dozen sites a year. Second, small towns, school districts and special districts with a 2027 or 2028 deadline and no in-house expert. Get your first three paid jobs from agencies at a partner rate.
Your first ten clients. List 30 web agencies in your state and 20 local governments or districts. Send 50 short emails, each offering a free sample: three real problems on one page of their site (or a client site they name), with the fix for each. Follow up once. Aim for 8 calls. Expect 2 to 4 paid quick reviews and one agency partner in the first two months; repeat each month and you reach ten clients in about six months.
An email for a town clerk or web manager:
Hello [name], I test websites for accessibility using screen readers and keyboard-only checks, and I work with small governments in [state]. Under the Justice Department’s rule, towns of your size need their websites to meet WCAG 2.1 AA by April 26, 2028. I looked at your "Pay a bill" page and found three problems a screen reader user would hit, including a form field with no label; I am happy to send them with fixes at no charge. If it is useful, a review of your five most-used pages is $600 and comes with a plain-language plan. I do technical testing only, not legal advice. [Name], [phone]
Channels, best to worst for this customer:
1. Agency and developer partners: the best source of steady work, often white-labeled.
2. Government and school associations: your state’s municipal league, clerks’ association and school business officials’ group run conferences and newsletters; offer a talk on the deadlines.
3. LinkedIn: the accessibility community and agency owners are active there; post short, real before-and-after fixes.
4. Accessibility meetups and conferences: referrals from other auditors who are overbooked.
5. Upwork: some U.S. clients look for testers there; good for early reviews, not your main channel.
6. Google Business Profile: little search volume for this locally, but list yourself.
7. Paid ads: last, and never with fear-based "avoid a lawsuit" messages.
Turning clients into case studies and referrals. With permission, publish the numbers: issues found, issues fixed, the task that now works by keyboard. Remove client names when they prefer. Give each agency partner a one-page sales sheet they can hand to their own clients. Publish a free checklist for small towns; it brings inbound inquiries for months. More in the launch and marketing playbook.
Running it week to week
Keep two or three fixed testing blocks a week; screen reader testing is tiring after a few hours. Use a standard report template and issue tracker. Run monitoring scans on the same day each month and send short reports. Keep up with WCAG updates and the federal rules, which are still changing. Track hours per audit so your quotes stay honest.
Rules to check
No license is needed to test websites. The rules shape what you promise. ADA Title III covers businesses open to the public; the Justice Department has not set a technical web standard for it in regulation, and courts have differed, which is why lawsuits continue. ADA Title II covers state and local governments: the Justice Department’s 2024 rule requires WCAG 2.1 AA, and an April 2026 interim final rule moved the deadlines to April 26, 2027 (populations of 50,000 or more) and April 26, 2028 (smaller governments and special districts). HHS made a similar move for health providers that receive its federal funding: May 11, 2027 for those with 15 or more employees and May 10, 2028 for smaller ones. The European Accessibility Act has applied since June 28, 2025 to some products and services sold to EU consumers, including online shopping, which matters for clients who sell to Europe.
You are not a lawyer. Never tell a client they are "ADA compliant", "covered" or safe from lawsuits, and do not sell or recommend overlay widgets as a fix; the FTC’s accessiBe order shows how such claims end. If a client has received a demand letter, they need their lawyer; you can do the technical work the lawyer asks for. Test with test accounts, not real customer data. Students: F-1 students generally may not freelance off campus without authorization, and self-employment tax applies once net earnings reach $400 a year. See For students.
What goes wrong
A client treats your report as a legal guarantee, then gets sued; state your scope and date in the contract and the report. You miss an issue on a page you did not test; list exactly what you tested. A developer "fixes" issues by hiding them from the scanner; always retest by hand. You underprice a site with fifty different templates; quote after a short look, not from the home page alone. And the federal dates move again, which can stall government buyers; keep private clients and agencies in the mix so one rule change does not empty your calendar.
Questions people ask
How much does a website accessibility audit cost?
As estimates, about $500 to $5,000 for a small to mid-size site, depending on how many templates and task flows are tested. A quick review of a few key pages can cost less, and fixing the issues is usually billed separately.
Do accessibility overlays make a website ADA compliant?
No overlay can promise that. In 2025 the FTC finalized an order requiring accessiBe to pay $1 million over claims that its AI widget could make any website WCAG-compliant. Real fixes are made in the site’s code and content, and checked by a person.
What is the ADA Title II website deadline for cities and counties?
After an April 2026 interim final rule, governments serving 50,000 or more people must meet WCAG 2.1 AA by April 26, 2027, and smaller governments and special districts by April 26, 2028. Existing ADA duties still apply in the meantime.
How do I become a web accessibility auditor?
Learn WCAG 2.1 and 2.2 from the W3C’s free materials, practice daily with a screen reader such as NVDA or VoiceOver, and write full audits of real sites for practice. IAAP’s CPACC and WAS certifications are optional but help with agencies and governments.
Can a college student do accessibility testing part time?
Yes, after training; the work can be done between classes and computer science students pick it up quickly. International students on F-1 visas generally cannot freelance for outside clients without work authorization, so check with your international student office first; an on-campus accessibility job may be an option.
Free help
The W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative publishes the WCAG standard, plain-language explanations and free tutorials. WebAIM publishes free articles and the yearly WebAIM Million results. NVDA, VoiceOver, TalkBack, WAVE and axe are free to use. The Justice Department’s ADA.gov explains the Title II rule. SCORE and your local Small Business Development Center help with pricing and contracts at no cost. Your campus disability services or digital accessibility office may let students shadow its testers.
Checked in November 2026: the DOJ and HHS deadlines after their 2026 extensions, the FTC’s accessiBe order, Seyfarth’s 2025 lawsuit count and the 2026 WebAIM Million results. The federal rules may change again; re-check ADA.gov and HHS before quoting any deadline to a client.