Calculate the ROI of catching accessibility issues early
Learn why testing early saves time, reduces costs, and improves efficiency.
Don’t pay 30 times more for accessibility issues.
Fix accessibility issues early in the software development lifecycle (SDLC) to reduce costs by 30 times and speed up deployment. With automated and AI-guided testing, design and development teams can find and fix up to 80% of issues by volume (PDF) without needing deep accessibility expertise. That means fewer reworks, smoother handoffs, and fewer blockers down the line.
Use our ROI calculator to see how much you could save by incorporating accessibility testing earlier in your workflows.
Read on for more information on how to use this calculator.
Shift left to cut costs
Shifting left means testing, identifying, and remediating for accessibility earlier—during design and development—not after code hits production.
Since the software development lifecycle (SDLC) flows left to right, a “left shift” moves accessibility earlier in the process, where it’s faster, easier, and cheaper to fix issues.
This proactive approach results in:
- Fewer costly fixes later
- Faster release cycles
- Better user experiences from the start
- Catching issues early protects user trust and avoids costly rework.
That’s why teams choose Deque and Axe DevTools—to build accessibility testing into workflows from the start, quickly and efficiently.
How to use the ROI calculator and understand results
To understand how much your organization can benefit from shifting left for identifying and correcting digital accessibility mistakes, we only need a few pieces of information. We’ll combine this information with industry averages for defect containment work to calculate your expected benefit.
Accessibility ROI calculator
Calculate how much your organization could save by implementing Deque’s accessibility testing tools.
Pull average hourly rate for dev teams
First, in order to understand the impact in funding or budgeting, we need the average hourly rate for your development teams. This “per hour” rate should be the average of the roles on your team – product owner, scrum master, designer, developer, tester, etc.
You can take these salaries and divide by 2,080 (number of working hours in 52 weeks) to get the hourly rate, and then the averages across each role. This will typically range from $50 to $125 depending on where your teams are located.
Input number of annual sprints
Next we’ll need to understand how many development iterations, or sprints, you have in a typical year. For a team that releases every 3 weeks, this might be 16 or 17 sprints.
Add in how many accessibility issues you find per sprint
Additionally, we’ll need to know how many accessibility defects you are generating in your current process without early testing.
You can pull the average number of issues created per sprint from an issue-tracking tool like Jira. Deque can also help by auditing your site or reviewing sample pages with Axe Monitor.
How to interpret your results
Once you have added in the above metrics and gotten your results, you’ll clearly be able to see the difference adding in tools that help you shift left can make to your bottom line. By moving testing to the development phase, you can save up to 30x what you’d spend saving testing until production. That’s not only impactful for cost savings, but also for time savings which means you can focus your resources and efforts where they make the greatest impact.
