The quotes owners forward to us run from about $49 to about $50,000, and the deliverables can look identical from the outside. Some are a scanner export with a logo on the cover. Others are three weeks of expert human testing. There is no price index for this market, so the number on the quote will not tell you which one you are holding. These seven questions will.
1. Who Actually Does the Testing?
Ask straight out whether a person who uses assistive technology every day will test your site, or whether testing means software plus a sighted person wearing headphones. The gap is bigger than most buyers expect. W3C publishes no conformance-tested automated rule at all for 24 of the 55 Level A and AA criteria, so no scanner reaches them, and a checkout that cannot be completed on screen reader audio alone produces no warning from any of them. If the answer wanders, you are buying automated testing with a person reading the output.
2. Can You See a Sample Report Before Paying?
A real auditor will show you the work product. Ask for one complete finding, with the rule it breaks, the exact element, a screenshot and the recommended fix. If the report only appears after a sales conversation, the conversation is the product. Ours is public at the sample report page.
Treat glowing third-party reviews of accessibility products with the same suspicion. In the Federal Trade Commission's case against an overlay vendor, the complaint records that the company paid $1,900 for one article formatted to look like an independent review and approved it before publication, paid $850 for another, and hired a marketing company to generate more of the same and push criticism down the search results. The final order bars presenting that kind of coverage as independent opinion. Somebody had to be ordered to stop.
3. Is the Price Published?
Published pricing means everybody pays the same. Asking you to get a quote means your price depends partly on how worried you sounded on the call. Large or unusual scopes genuinely need a conversation, and a basic audit of ten pages has no reason to hide a number.
4. Do They Also Sell the Fixes?
This is the question we would never skip. An auditor who profits from the remediation has a reason to find more problems and to price the repairs generously, and it is the same structure as a home inspector who owns the roofing company. Plenty of firms do both and behave impeccably. You cannot verify that from outside, though, and you do not have to accept the uncertainty when there is an easy way around it. Pick an auditor who only audits, or hire two different companies for the two jobs.
Since this list says us included, here is our answer to it. We sell audits and nothing else. There is no page on this site that will quote you for repair work, no arrangement under which we would, and no referral fee coming to us from whoever you hire instead. That is checkable rather than a promise, because a price we do not publish anywhere is a price we cannot charge.
Ask the same question about whoever recommended the auditor to you. The same FTC complaint records that the vendor offered agency partners a twenty percent discount on its standard pricing, which the agency could pass to the client or keep as commission. Its current partner page advertises recurring commission from twenty percent up to thirty. That is a normal commercial arrangement, published in plain sight, and it still will not appear on the invoice you get from the agency. So ask the agency directly whether it is paid for the referral.
5. What Do They Mean by Compliant?
No auditor can certify a website as protected from lawsuits. WCAG conformance is measurable and immunity is not something anybody can honestly sell, and the standard itself publishes no score, no percentage and no certification scheme. Nor is there such a thing as being VPAT certified, whatever a vendor tells you. If a pitch contains guaranteed compliance or 100% protected, leave. What an honest auditor gives you is evidence. What was tested, what failed, what got fixed, with dates on it. Ask what the engagement is meant to produce as well as what it is called, because nobody has ever ruled on these words. Gap analysis, audit or conformance evaluation sets out the three depths and what lands in your hands at the end of each.
6. Which Rules Do They Check?
The answer should be all 55 WCAG 2.2 Level A and AA success criteria, with a pass or a fail recorded against each one. If they say they check the top issues, they check what a scanner checks. You can read every rule yourself in the rule library and ask about any of them by number, which is a short conversation that tells you a great deal.
7. What Happens After the Report?
Your team fixes the problems. Then what? Ask what a re-check costs and how soon it can happen, because an auditor with no answer is not expecting to hear from you again. Our re-check is half price within 3 months, and it is written on the pricing page rather than negotiated.
Take the list with you
Ask all seven of any auditor, including us. Ours are answered on the method page, and if any of them takes more than a paragraph to answer, that is the answer.