Cost per hour for Accessibility Testing

Like all things tech, it widely varies based on location and levels of certification

Authors note: Because of Medium’s refusal to address its accessibility issues for both authors and readers, I’ve moved my last three years of blogs to Substack. Please sign up there for notices of all new articles. Also, I will be updating older articles (like this one) and the updates will only be published on Substack. Thank you for your continued readership and support.

This is part one of a two-part article. The second part focuses on whether you should staff testing resources as employees, contractors, or use crowdsourcing.

Although I am usually not afraid of confrontation, this is an article that I have avoided writing about for a while. No matter what I write below, I’m going to piss someone off. Spending the last two months in a really intense “pitchathon” program has helped thicken my skin in a few places, so upon multiple requests, I am putting my thoughts out there on salaries and cost per hour that accessibility consults should expect to receive, and organizations should expect to pay.

Disclaimer: I currently work (or have worked in the past) with several accessibility consultancies, but have not spoken with any of them about this article. I was a Level Access contractor in 2014 (when it was SSB Bart Group).

Premise

A friend of mine reached out on LinkedIn. She had recently interviewed at a large university in a very big city who was currently in litigation over lack of WCAG compliance. They offered her what would be effectively poverty wages in that particular city for a position with an end date (funding was not guaranteed after a certain point) where they were requesting someone with:

• Five years of experience
• IAAP certification
• WCAG testing skills utilizing many forms of assistive technology
• Coding capabilities in Drupal, Wordpress, and PHP, and;
• Curriculum development skills.

So basically what they were looking for was:

- someone with incredibly elite skills (testing/coding/training)