Does the Document Inventory's cost apply toward remediation work?

No. The $2,000 Inventory is priced on its own and is not credited against later work. It is the scoping document a remediation quote is built from, and it is yours to use whoever does that work.

ADA Title II · What it costs

What does PDF accessibility remediation cost?

Q: What does PDF accessibility remediation cost?

There is no single number. Remediation is quoted per engagement, because the work is not per-page — rebuilding a document's structure, transcribing a map's legend, and producing a companion version of a signed record are three different jobs at three different costs. What has a published price is the step before it: the Document Inventory, $2,000 for libraries up to 5,000 documents, which tells us what is actually in your library so remediation can be quoted honestly instead of guessed.

Q: Why is there no published per-page rate for remediation?

Because a rate that charged the same for a page of prose and a page carrying a chart would be a number we could not stand behind. A search of cooperative contract rate cards, state contract databases, county bid tabulations and council agenda packets found no public-sector price for this work published anywhere; established vendors quote per file, on request, after reviewing your documents.

There is no single number, and anyone who gives you one before opening your library is quoting a guess. Below is why the number is this hard to get, and what it actually takes to replace the guess with a real one.

Why the number is hard to get in the first place

Most agencies asking this question do not actually know what is in their own document library. Not the count, and not the shape of it — which files are already accessible, which are close, which need a document rebuilt from the structure up. Finding that out is not a glance. It is a qualified read of every document: is this a heading or just bold text, does the reading order make sense read aloud, does a table have a caption, does a scanned signature page have any text behind it at all. A validator answers some of that on its own — roughly 30–40% of it — and the rest needs either specialized software tuned to catch it or a person trained to judge it, because neither is optional and neither is free.

What that costs, once someone is actually doing the work: the two vendors we found with an actual published rate card, rather than a quote on request, price a straightforward page at $4 to $10 and a page needing alt text and screen-reader QA at up to $18 — Accessible.org and Accessiblü. Both quote a scanned page, a form, or a chart-heavy page individually rather than at the per-page rate, which is the same reason we do not publish one either. We have not transacted at either rate ourselves and cannot vouch for what a given page of yours would actually cost elsewhere — we are reporting what is publicly advertised, not what anyone has verified.

Put those rates against a real library and the number gets large fast. On the one we have measured end to end — roughly 2,700 documents and more than 60,000 sheets — remediating every sheet blindly, at even the low end of that range, is on the order of a quarter of a million dollars. Most of that library almost certainly does not need remediation at all: some of it is already accessible, some of it is excepted outright. Nobody can tell you which sheets are which without reading them, and quoting against the raw page count instead of the actual scope is exactly the guess the top of this page is talking about.

Remediation: no published rate, and here is why

Quoted per engagement

after the Inventory tells us what is actually there. We do not publish a per-page rate, because the work is not per-page: rebuilding a document's structure, transcribing a map's legend, and producing a companion version of a signed record are three different jobs at three different costs. A rate that charged the same for a page of prose and a page carrying a chart would be a number we could not stand behind.

What it actually takes to get a real number

The only way to answer this for your library is to look at every document in it — not sample it, not estimate it, actually look. That is a full Document Inventory: every document crawled, tested, and reviewed by a person, so the rates above stop being applied blindly and become a number for your specific library.

That is a deeper look than the free scan we offer, and the two are not the same thing. The free scan gives you the shape of the problem — counts and shares of the whole library — without naming a single document. If you have not already, get the free scan first. It costs nothing, and it is what tells you whether the Inventory below is worth the next step. Once you have it, come back here and look at the Inventory in earnest.

You are not paying $2,000 to be told what remediation costs. You are paying it to replace a quote against your whole library — the quarter-million-dollar version above — with a quote against what actually needs the work, which is almost always a small fraction of it.

$2,000

for the full Document Inventory: a fresh crawl of your public document library, tested, with a person's review before release, delivered within five business days of your card payment or your purchase order. Paid by card, or against your agency's purchase order invoiced net 30 if you write to us first. For libraries up to 5,000 documents; larger agencies do the same.

It stands on its own. The Inventory is proof of what your library actually needs, and it is yours to use whoever does the work.

Buy the Inventory

Why almost nobody in this field publishes a price

We looked for transacted public-sector prices in cooperative contract rate cards, state contract databases, county bid tabulations and council agenda packets, and found none. The established vendors quote per file, on request, after reviewing your documents — which means an agency cannot compare two quotes side by side without first handing both vendors the whole library.

We can publish a price because we are specific about what we will not do, and that is the same discipline as the rest of this site: a number is only worth publishing next to what it does and does not cover.

We will not report a document as fine because a validator found nothing. A checker deciding part of the standard is not the same as a document being accessible — and a quote built on a validator's pass alone is a quote built on the wrong measurement.
We will not take on work a machine cannot finish and quietly do it badly. Where a document needs human hands, the report says so and prices it separately — or says we are not the right people for it.
We will not pretend our own limits away. On the one library we have measured end to end — 2,691 documents — our automated pass refused 376 of them and said why: 359 were scanned images with no text to work from, 9 the tagger declined, and 8 were encrypted. We would rather you read that here than discover it after paying us.

We are not attorneys and this is not legal advice. We produce evidence and a recommendation you can hand to your counsel, who decides.

Get the number that starts the clock

The free scan is what tells you whether the $2,000 Inventory is the right next step at all — the size and shape of your problem, measured on your own library rather than estimated from someone else's, at no charge and no obligation. See exactly what each one tells you.

Get the free scan
Three fields — your agency, its website, and where to send the result. Nothing to install, nothing to sign, and no meeting.