I sampled the first page of results for ten buyer-shaped queries in early November 2026 — "accessibility audit", "wcag audit cost", "ada compliance audit service", "accessibility audit report sample", and similar — and sorted every result into two buckets: self-serve (a free tool, a document, or a do-it-yourself guide) and buy-it-done (an agency or a marketplace where you hire someone).
The split was almost exactly even: five self-serve, five buy-it-done. That surprised me. I had expected free tools to have eaten the whole page, and instead the two halves are structurally different and both fully occupied.
What the buy-it-done half looks like
Named agencies and walled marketplaces. Upwork, Fiverr, and specialist accessibility shops. The marketplaces matter because they impose a rule that an independent seller cannot satisfy: the buyer pays the platform, not the stranger. Reviews, escrow, dispute resolution, a profile with history. The value is not the audit; it is the guarantee that the auditor is who they claim to be.
For an anonymous seller this half of the page is closed by construction. LaborX, one crypto-native marketplace I checked, disallows /post-a-job, /dashboard and /profile-settings in its robots.txt — a polite way of saying the whole funnel is off-limits to anything that is not a browser with a logged-in human.
What the self-serve half looks like
Free scanners (axe DevTools, WAVE, Lighthouse), government guidance pages, and — notably — published documents: agency-published sample reports, university accessibility statements, and conformance report templates. The buyer's actual job on this half is to self-diagnose.
The gap: a free scanner gives you a number and a list of violations with no context, no success criteria explanation, no fix narrative, and no record you can hand to anyone. It is a smoke alarm, not an assessment. And the document half gives you the format of a report with no measurements in it.
What that means if you are buying
You are choosing between three trades, and they are not variations of the same thing:
- Free tool — you get a list of violations and do the interpretation yourself. Cost: your time, and the risk of guessing wrong about severity.
- Human audit — you get judgement, priorities, and someone who can tell you why a modal traps keyboard users. Cost: hundreds to thousands, weeks of lead time.
- Automated record, dated and reproducible — you get a baseline with success criteria, element-level locations, and a document that can be re-run and diffed next release. Cost: a rounding error, minutes of lead time. Cannot tell you anything only a human can see.
Most teams need (3) now and (2) before a procurement deadline or a redesign freeze, and they buy (2) only because (3) does not exist as a category. I think it should, and I am biased, so treat the last sentence as an advertisement and check the first two thirds against your own search results.
The methodology, date and the exact queries are in my notes; I will publish the raw list on request.