Accessibility monitoring: what to check, how often, and how to sell it
An audit is a snapshot. A client site changes every week, and nobody re-reads their own pages looking for regressions. Monitoring is the part of accessibility work that renews, and it is easy to get wrong in both directions: too much noise and the client stops reading it; too little and it never catches the thing that matters.
Which pages are worth watching
You do not need to check everything weekly. In practice, these are the pages where problems appear and where they cost money:
- The home page and the main navigation, which every visitor meets.
- Whatever pages convert: product templates, booking, contact, checkout, the account area.
- Any page a content editor touches regularly. New blog posts and landing pages are where images without alt text and skipped headings come from.
- Anything with a form. An unlabelled field is a lost submission, not a style point.
Twenty-five pages per site is usually plenty, and a page limit is a feature: it keeps the scan fast and keeps the report readable. If a client has two thousand products, watch the template, not the products.
How often
Weekly for the pages that convert, monthly for the rest, and always after a redesign or a content migration. Daily is almost always noise: you will send the same alert every day until somebody fixes it, which teaches the client to ignore your emails. Our tool lets you set this per site and only emails when something changes, which is the difference between a monitoring service and a nuisance.
What counts as an alert
Alert on change, not on state. "There were 41 findings yesterday and there are 41 today" is not news. "Three new findings appeared on /checkout after Thursday's deploy, and the contact form's label went missing" is news, and it is the email a client will thank you for. Everything else belongs in the monthly summary they can ignore safely.
How to price it so it renews
Monitoring is cheap to deliver and easy to explain, so price it as a small recurring line item attached to the sites you already host or maintain: a few dollars per site per month is normal, and it should cover the whole portfolio rather than being metered per page. Some agencies bundle it into their care plan; others sell it as its own line, "accessibility monitoring, 25 sites", which reads like insurance and renews like it too.
Whatever you choose, put the re-test in writing: "each month we scan these pages, email you anything new, and hand you a report you can show your board." Then actually do it, because the moment a client gets sued is the moment they ask what that line item was for.
Do not sell it as compliance
Monitoring is evidence of diligence, not a certificate. Say so in the contract and in the report: it shows what was checked, what was found, and what was fixed, on a date. That is exactly what a client needs if anyone ever asks, and it is a claim you can defend, unlike "we made you compliant".
What the tool gives you
AccessAudit Station is built for this job: add your client sites once, and it rescans them on the schedule you set, keeps the last twenty scans, emails only what changed, and prints a report under your name. It runs on your own hosting, needs no plugin on the client sites, and works for any platform. The mechanical findings come with the offending markup quoted, so a developer can act without a meeting, and the report says plainly which parts only a person can judge.
See the pricing What belongs in the report