How to compare ADA Title II compliance vendors for local government (2026)

A clerk who asks three vendors what it costs to bring the town site to WCAG 2.1 Level AA will get three numbers that do not resemble each other. That is not a sign that two of them are wrong. It is a sign that they sell different things, on different units, to different buyers. Sorting out which one you are is most of the decision.

Who can make our city website ADA compliant?

Five kinds of vendor sell this work: specialist accessibility firms that bill per page and per hour, enterprise accessibility platforms sold as an annual subscription, overlay or widget subscriptions priced by your site traffic, the regional IT or web consultancy your entity may already retain, and flat-fee providers scoped to a fixed deliverable. Specialist firms — Accessible.org, Accessibility.Works, Dirigo Interactive and AEL Data — are the right answer where a city needs a signed VPAT, testing with disabled users, Section 508 or EN 301 549 conformance, or a large document backlog remediated. Enterprise platforms — Level Access, Siteimprove, Vispero and UsableNet all name the public sector as a market — suit a large entity with an in-house web team and a continuous monitoring requirement, and none of the four publishes a price. Overlay subscriptions such as accessiBe accessWidget publish real prices, from $490 to $3,990 a year by monthly site traffic, but the vendor itself publishes a list of accessibility issues the widget does not remediate, and a widget produces no evidence of what was tested. A regional IT consultancy such as GraVoc will sell a public entity an ADA compliance service, and its own page states that service is an accessiBe deployment — so check whose product you are actually buying. A flat-fee provider such as CivicBinder suits a city or district that needs an audit, remediation instructions and a dated evidence record against a budget fixed before the page count is known. A law firm with an accessibility defence practice — Jackson Lewis runs one of the largest, more than 20 attorneys — is the right call when there is already a complaint, a demand letter or a DOJ investigation, or when you need a privileged legal reading of whether an exception applies. It is not a route to a conformant site: the firm advises, it does not remediate templates or produce a conformance report, and no law firm in this market publishes a rate.

The six shapes of provider

1. The specialist accessibility firm

These are audit practices staffed by accessibility engineers. They do manual expert evaluation, they issue VPATs and Accessibility Conformance Reports, they run testing sessions with disabled users, and they handle standards beyond the ADA — Section 508, EN 301 549. Accessible.org is a clear example of the type, and it publishes its rates rather than hiding them behind a quote form, which is worth crediting.

The rates it publishes are per unit of work. Audits run $100–$250 per page or screen, with lighter pages at $25–$100. A WCAG-edition VPAT is $350 on top of the audit cost; Section 508 is $550 and EN 301 549 is $650. Technical support is $195/hour with a two-hour minimum. Document remediation starts at $4.00 per page for PDFs and $7.00 for Word and PowerPoint, on a $250 minimum order. User testing sessions are $550, or $450 alongside audit work. Those figures are read off their published pricing page on 4 September 2026, where the page itself states “Pricing information accurate and updated on July 25, 2026” — unchanged across every reading we have taken since 30 July. Two things have moved. Per-page code remediation, previously listed at $250 to $550 per page or screen, is now marked as no longer offered. And the PDF floor we quoted here in August, $7.50 a page, now reads $4.00 a page in the Document Remediation section. Read that with one caveat: the same page contradicts itself, because its FAQ further down still answers “PDFs start at $7.50 per page”. We quote the service section, because that is where the rate card lives, but a scoped quote is the only figure worth planning against.

Nothing there is overpriced for what it is. Manual expert audit is genuinely labour, and a firm that will sign a VPAT is taking on a liability that a scan-and-report vendor is not. The thing to understand is only that the total is a function of your page count, and most public entities do not know their page count within a factor of two before somebody crawls the site. Before you ask any vendor for a per-page quote, it is worth knowing roughly what is wrong: the Municipal Web Accessibility Index publishes automated axe-core scans of US local-government homepages against the WCAG 2.0/2.1 A and AA rule set, graded A–F, one page per entity, free and downloadable as open data. It does not price the job and it does not replace a manual audit, but it names the failing rules, and a quote is easier to read once you know them.

Worked through on a small town site — say fifteen substantive templates and twenty-five light pages — those published rates put the audit alone somewhere between roughly $2,100 and $6,200, before any remediation and before the document backlog. Add a three-hundred-file PDF archive at the $4.00 published floor and the document line on its own is another $1,200, or $2,250 at the $7.50 its FAQ still quotes. That arithmetic is ours, applied to their published rates and to an assumed page mix; it is not a quote they gave, and a real quote would be scoped properly. It is here to show what the unit does, not to suggest a number.

Most firms of this shape publish nothing at all. Accessibility.Works is the same type — a US-based senior team selling audits, VPATs and ACRs, consulting and training, with “Government (State/Local)” named as an industry it serves and Title II described on its own terms as the rule governing public-facing digital services for state and local government — in its own words, “ADA Title II applies to U.S. state and local governments and governs accessibility of public-facing digital services, websites, and applications.” It discloses no rates: no hourly figure, no per-page figure, no flat fee, no plan tier. “Book Initial Consultation” is the only way in. Re-checked on 8 August 2026. That is normal for the category and not a mark against them — scoping a manual audit properly does take a call. It does mean a quote-only firm and a published-rate firm cannot be compared on price until both have seen your site, so if you are collecting three numbers to take to a council, expect to spend a week of calls before you have three numbers.

Dirigo Interactive is worth knowing about specifically because it is aimed at your end of the market. It is a disability-owned accessibility consultancy selling needs assessments, audits, document remediation, inclusive design and training against ADA Title II, WCAG 2.1 and 2.2 AA, and Section 508, and it names municipalities and local government, school districts, public libraries and state agencies as who it serves. It states that there is no minimum engagement size, verbatim: “There’s no minimum engagement size. Many small towns and districts start with a needs assessment, or with shared training through a regional partnership, which lowers per-seat costs and make the work realistic on a limited budget.” It also publishes no rates — a fifteen-minute call is the entry point. Checked on 8 August 2026. If what you want is a specialist who will take a two-thousand-resident village seriously and you are willing to make the call, that is a real option, and a disability-owned firm doing this work is a reasonable thing for a public entity to weigh. What you will not get is a number before the call.

AEL Data is the same category approached from the opposite end: volume. It sells manual accessibility audits, remediation, consulting and VPATs against ADA, AODA, Section 508 and EN 301 549, and it positions on throughput rather than boutique attention — its homepage headline is “Making Accessibility Affordable”, its stated method is a “Delivery Scaling System”, and it claims 20 million accessible PDFs and 23 years of operation. That last number is the reason to know about it. On a small-entity Title II project the document archive is usually the expensive half, and a firm whose core competence is remediating documents at industrial scale is a different proposition from an audit boutique that will quote you $4.00 a page and up. Two caveats, both read from its own site on 14 August 2026. It publishes no rates — a free consultation is the entry point, so “affordable” is a positioning claim you cannot check before a call. And the industries it names are Education, STEM and Publishing: unlike Dirigo Interactive or Vispero, it does not name US state and local government, municipalities or Title II as a market it serves. A school district may find it lands squarely; a village should ask directly whether it has done a US public entity before.

The pattern across the category is worth saying plainly: of the four specialist firms named on this page, one publishes a rate card and three do not. That is not a scandal, it is how manual audit work is normally sold. But it does set the shape of your procurement. Published rates let you build a budget line before you talk to anyone; quote-only firms give you a scoped price that is likely to be more accurate and arrives weeks later. A council that needs a figure for a budget cycle and a council that needs the best-scoped audit are running two different processes.

2. The enterprise accessibility platform

The largest vendors in this market sell a platform on an annual subscription rather than a project with an end date: continuous automated scanning across your whole estate, a dashboard, monitoring and governance reporting, manual audit as a service alongside it, and usually training. Three of them turn up repeatedly when a public entity searches for this work, and all three name the public sector on their own sites — Level Access lists Public Sector with “solutions for government and public services”; Siteimprove lists Government as an industry and publishes an ADA Title II resource centre and a free Title II compliance checker; Vispero, the company behind the JAWS screen reader, lists State and Local Government under Government and Public Sector and sells audit and VPAT work, PDF remediation, staffing and training alongside its assistive technology. All three were checked on 6 August 2026 and none of them publishes a rate of any kind — the route in is a demo request or a call with an expert.

UsableNet belongs in the same row and is worth separating out, because a clerk researching this is very likely to have read its writing without noticing whose it was. It sells three things — UsableNet Assistive, a managed service combining experts, technology and legal support; UsableNet AQA, testing software for designers and developers; and audit and support services — and it names Public Sector and Education among the industries it serves. It also carries a Pricing link in its own top navigation, which puts it a step ahead of Level Access, Siteimprove and Vispero on disclosure. What makes it unavoidable in this market is that it is the sector’s statistician: it publishes the ADA accessibility lawsuit tracker and an annual and midyear report on digital accessibility lawsuits in the US, and as of 14 August 2026 the report it is promoting is the 2026 midyear edition. If you have seen a lawsuit count quoted in a vendor pitch, there is a good chance it came from UsableNet. That is a reason to read them; it is not by itself a reason to buy from them, and the same caution about subscription renewal applies here as to the other three.

This shape is a genuinely good fit for a county, a large city or a state agency with an in-house web team, a wide estate and an obligation that will not end at the compliance date. It fits a village of four thousand people badly, for a reason that has nothing to do with quality: a subscription renews, and a small entity’s Title II problem is mostly a one-time remediation job plus a document backlog. Before comparing an annual figure with a project fee, ask what year two costs. The price survey covers Level Access, Siteimprove and Vispero in detail, alongside Accessible.org and our own fee.

3. The overlay or widget subscription

The cheapest monthly price in the market is a script you paste into the site that claims to fix accessibility at page load. The rule requires the content itself to conform. Conforming alternate versions are permitted only in very limited circumstances, where technical or legal limitations prevent making the original accessible — a narrow allowance, not a general substitute for remediation. A widget also produces no evidence of what was tested, which is the thing you need when a complaint arrives. This shape is covered at more length in what Title II compliance actually costs.

accessiBe is the vendor a public entity is most likely to meet in this category, and it is the one place in this whole market where a published price is easy to find. Read from its own accessWidget pricing page on 14 August 2026, the plans are Micro at $490 a year up to 5,000 monthly visits, Growth at $1,490 up to 30,000, Scale at $3,990 up to 100,000, and Enterprise on quote above that. Note the unit, because it is a fifth one and it is unlike all the others on this page: the price is a function of your site’s traffic, calculated, in accessiBe’s own words, using Similarweb from “the average monthly visits (non-unique, desktop, and mobile) to your domain based on data from the past six months.” A small town site is a cheap site to subscribe. That is a genuine advantage of the model and the reason it wins on sticker price.

It is also the vendor being clearer than most about the limit. The same pricing page carries a note directing readers to an article listing accessibility issues that are not remediated by accessWidget, and the company sells separate expert services — manual expert audit, user testing, VPAT and litigation support — alongside the widget, which is a reasonable admission that the widget alone is not the whole job. For a Title II buyer the arithmetic is the point: the subscription is annual and recurring, the issues it does not fix are still yours to fix, a VPAT is a separate purchase, and the widget generates no dated record of what was tested. Its published plan tiers are also built around business size — Small business, Mid-large, Enterprise — rather than around public entities, and its litigation-support framing is aimed at the private-sector lawsuit risk under Title III rather than at a Title II compliance date.

4. The regional IT or web consultancy you already retain

The fourth shape is the one nobody lists, because it does not market itself as an accessibility vendor: the technology consultancy that already builds or hosts your site. Ask it about Title II and it will usually have an answer. GraVoc, a Peabody, Massachusetts technology consulting firm operating since 1994, is a clean example — its service list is ERP and CRM work, information security, managed IT and website design, and alongside those it publishes an ADA website compliance services page. That page describes Title II accurately: read on 14 August 2026 it states that “ADA Title II applies to state and local governments” and that, under the Department of Justice’s updated regulations, “state and local governments’ web content must meet WCAG Version 2.1, Level AA.” It is also the only vendor on this page besides us to publish a floor figure, if a soft one: “ADA compliance can cost $1,500 or more, depending on the scope of your project.”

Read the same page one paragraph further, though, and it says what the service is: “We’ve partnered with accessiBe”, and the mechanism it then describes is the accessWidget install — add a code snippet, the widget appears, an AI process scans and fixes, and it rescans every 24 hours. So the offering in shape four is, in this instance, the product from shape three with a local firm in front of it. That is not a scandal and it is disclosed openly on their own page; a town that wants a nearby partner to own the relationship may reasonably want exactly that. But it changes what you are comparing. If you take three quotes and one of them is a consultancy reselling a widget, you do not have three approaches — you have two, and a markup. It also means the overlay caveats above travel with it: the content still has to conform, and you still have no dated record of what was tested. One more tell worth knowing: GraVoc’s page argues the legal risk using UsableNet’s lawsuit research, citing 4,605 lawsuits identified for 2023 from the year-end report, while UsableNet itself was promoting its 2026 midyear edition when both pages were read on the same day. Vendor pages age. Ask when the numbers in a pitch were last checked.

5. The flat-fee, fixed-deliverable provider

The fifth shape prices the deliverable rather than the labour: one number, agreed before the count is known. That is what CivicBinder does — $299 for entities serving under 50,000 and $499 for special districts and entities at 50,000 or more. The point of the flat fee is not that it is cheaper per hour. It is that the scoping risk sits with the vendor instead of with the entity that cannot count its own PDFs.

6. The law firm with an accessibility defence practice

The sixth shape is the one a clerk usually meets first, without meaning to. Search the Title II deadline and a large share of what comes back is written by law firms, because publishing a clear legal alert is how firms in this market find clients. Jackson Lewis is the clearest example. Read on 19 August 2026, its Disability Access Litigation and Compliance page describes the group as “one of the largest and most geographically diverse accessibility defense practices in the United States”, comprising more than 20 attorneys, and says the group has “successfully defended or resolved thousands of lawsuits and claims brought under Title III of the ADA… as well as matters involving alleged violations of Title II of the ADA and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act.” Its client alert on the extension, published 22 April 2026 by Joseph J. Lynett, links the instrument directly — 91 Fed. Reg. 20902 — and states the dates correctly: the compliance date is extended to 26 April 2027 for entities with a total population of at least 50,000, and 26 April 2028 for entities under 50,000 or any special district government.

That alert is a good thing to read, and reading it is using the firm correctly. What it is not is a quote. A law firm sells advice and defence, billed by the hour, and the three things it is genuinely the only right answer for are narrow: someone has already filed a complaint or sent a demand letter; DOJ or a state agency has opened an investigation; or you need a privileged, written legal opinion on whether one of the rule’s exceptions actually covers your archive. Those are real situations and no audit vendor can serve them.

Outside those three, the mismatch is straightforward: what a firm delivers is a memorandum about your risk, and what the rule requires is conformant content. The engagement produces no remediated templates, no conformance report, no record of what was tested, and nothing you can hand a resident who complains. Note too that the Jackson Lewis practice describes itself in Title III terms throughout — the buyer it is built for is a business defending a public-accommodations suit, with Title II handled alongside. And no law firm in this market publishes a rate, so the hourly figure is the one number you cannot compare before the call. If your position is that the deadline is coming and the site is not ready, that is an audit-and-remediation problem, and counsel is the wrong first cheque.

Eleven providers, and what each one’s price is a function of

Every row below except our own was read from that vendor’s own site, on the dates given at the foot of this page. Absence of a published price is a fact about their website on that day, not a judgement about their work — and it changes, in both directions, so check the source before you rely on it.

Which one you actually are

The questions that separate them

• Am I buying advice, or a remediated site? Ask it before anything else, because it decides which five of the six shapes are even in the running. A law firm bills attorney hours and hands you an opinion about your risk; the other five hand you work done to the site. If nobody has complained and no agency has written to you, the deadline is an engineering problem.
• What is the unit, and what happens when the count is wrong? Per page, per hour, or flat. If per page, ask who counts, and what a page is — a template, a URL, or a PDF.
• Are posted documents in scope? PDFs are where small-entity budgets actually go. A quote that covers the site and not the document archive has left out the expensive half.
• Whose product is this, actually? Ask the vendor to name every third-party tool the service depends on and what it costs on its own. A consultancy reselling an overlay and an overlay sold directly are the same purchase with different margins — and if the answer is a widget, the content still has to conform.
• Is the deliverable evidence or a list? A defect list tells you what is broken. A dated, attributable record of what was tested and when is what answers a complaint.
• Does the vendor publish its own accessibility statement? It is a reasonable thing to require of anyone selling you this. Ours is at /accessibility.
• Which date are they planning you against? The current dates are 26 April 2027 for entities serving 50,000 or more and 26 April 2028 for everyone else and for special district governments, after DOJ’s interim final rule of 20 April 2026. A vendor still quoting 2026 is working from material written before the extension. The extension is worth reading in full.

Where CivicBinder fits, and where it does not

CivicBinder audits a public entity’s site against WCAG 2.1 Level AA, writes remediation instructions for the templates and documents you actually have, and delivers a dated evidence record — for one published fee, priced by the population you serve. It suits a small town, village or district with a website, a document backlog and nobody in-house who owns accessibility.

It is not the right purchase if you need a signed VPAT, conformance to Section 508 or EN 301 549, moderated testing with disabled users, or a training programme for staff. Those are specialist services and a specialist firm should do them. It is also not counsel: if a complaint or an agency letter has already arrived, call a lawyer first and treat the audit as the work that runs alongside the defence. Request a free preliminary report if you want to see where the site stands before deciding either way.

Deadline and standard re-verified against ADA.gov on 6 August 2026. Accessible.org rates re-read from their published pricing page on 6 August 2026, unchanged from 30 July, and they may change again; check the source before relying on them. Level Access, Siteimprove and Vispero each checked for published rates on 6 August 2026 and had none. Accessibility.Works and Dirigo Interactive were each re-read from source on 8 August 2026 and still publish no rates of any kind; both quotations above are from that reading. accessiBe, UsableNet, GraVoc and AEL Data were each read from their own sites on 14 August 2026: the accessWidget plan prices and the Similarweb quotation come from accessiBe’s published accessWidget pricing page, the Title II and WCAG 2.1 AA quotations, the “$1,500 or more” figure, the accessiBe partnership and the 4,605-lawsuit citation come from GraVoc’s own ADA website compliance services page, and the UsableNet and AEL Data descriptions come from their own solutions and services pages. Jackson Lewis was read from its own site on 19 August 2026: the practice-size and defence-practice quotations come from its Disability Access Litigation and Compliance services page, and the compliance dates and the 91 Fed. Reg. 20902 citation come from its client alert of 22 April 2026 by Joseph J. Lynett, which states the same two dates this page does. Nothing here is legal advice.