Planning your accessibility career (part 7 of 7)
Part 7 of a 7 part series
Accessibility TestingVocationcareer
This is the last article in the series about starting a career in digital accessibility.
"Accessibility" isn't one job. It's a cluster of quite different careers wearing the same name badge, and you need to pick one that suits how you work and how you think.
I started my career specialising in testing. For this you need to develop an in-depth knowledge of WCAG conformance. Other jobs with accessibility in the title don't need this specific knowledge, and instead focus on guiding organisations to making their digital content more compliant and better for users. They will normally need to do this through a cultural shift - placing more emphasis on discussing accessibility needs earlier in the process, putting systems in place to make sure it is a functional requirement and part of their definition of done. It's a very different job, and more aligned to what I do now.
There are many different flavours of accessibility jobs in-between.
I'm going to lay out the main choices as clearly as I can. Employment or self-employment. What kind of specialisation. What kind of sector. My aim in this article is to help you understand what might suit you best.
Employment vs self-employment
Employment gives you a fixed salary, sick pay, holiday pay, pension contributions, and someone else worrying about where the next piece of work is coming from. If you're in-house at a decent organisation, you'll be embedded in the product teams, working with the same people over time, and you'll learn the domain deeply. If you're at a consultancy or agency, you'll work across lots of clients, learn a wide variety of patterns, and probably (hopefully) have more structured training and progression.
The trade-off is that you don't fully control what you work on. You'll do audits you find boring, sit in meetings you find frustrating, and follow processes you disagree with. That's fine, and it's the price of the stability. But it's real.
I can't cover every currency in the world here, so I'll give you the figures from where I'm sitting in the UK. They are going to vary wildly across the globe. But for context, minimum wage here is £12.71 for an adult over 21, so a minimum annual full-time salary based on that would be around £24,000.
UK salary ranges for accessibility roles as I write this (August 2026), from a mix of personal knowledge, Glassdoor, Indeed, and ITJobsWatch data: junior and mid-level accessibility roles broadly £25,000 to £55,000. Senior specialist roles £55,000 to £75,000. Lead and head-of roles from £75,000 upwards, with the top end reaching six figures in the private sector.
Self-employment gives you control and, potentially, more money. You choose which clients to take, which sectors to work in, and how you spend your time. If you're good at it, you'll out-earn the equivalent employed role, sometimes by a lot. If you're not good at it, or you hit a rough patch, you'll be under real financial pressure. There's no one to bail you out.
The freelance day rate for accessibility testing in the UK sits roughly between £400 and £700 for most people, with the median around £475. Experienced specialists can charge more, around £800 to £1,000 a day.
Bear in mind that a day rate isn't a salary. You need to knock off holiday, sick days, admin, chasing invoices, and the days you're between contracts. A useful rule of thumb is that a £500 day rate at 180 billable days a year gives you roughly the equivalent of a £63,000 employed salary once you factor in pension, overheads, and unpaid time.
The bit to remember about self-employment is that the accessibility work is only part of the job. You also have to sell yourself, manage your own accounts, chase late payments, decide when to raise your rates, work out when to say no, and sometimes carry the emotional load of a quiet month with no work in the pipeline. You need to know your tolerance for this as it will typically happen when you've got unexpected bills to pay and your car and washing machine conspired to break down at the same time.
If you're not sure then I would say that employment is usually the right starting point. You'll learn the craft, build a reputation, and develop the network you'll need if you later want to go independent.
Most successful freelancers spent their early years employed, and most who tried to freelance from day one struggled harder than they needed to. Some people bounce between the two.
The last thing I'd say is that if you are going self-employed generate a cash-buffer for as much as you can. put money away each month. You never know when you'll need it.
Where the jobs actually are
If you go the employment route, the shape of your employer matters a lot. There are roughly four kinds and each one is a different day-to-day experience.
In-house at a large organisation. You'll be part of a digital or product team, embedded in ongoing work. The best of these jobs are at companies that take accessibility seriously and have a proper function around it. The worst are places where you're the only accessibility person and you spend more time trying to persuade people you should exist than actually testing. Ask questions at interview about the accessibility team, the budget, the seniority of the champion, and how conflicts get resolved. The answers will tell you which kind of role you're looking at.
Specialist accessibility agencies. There are plenty of these now, especially in the UK, US, Australia and a rapidly growing number of agencies in Europe following the recent European Accessibility Act (2025). You'll work across a wide variety of clients, learn fast, and be surrounded by people who know what they're doing. The learning curve here is steepest and the environment tends to be genuinely supportive. The trade-off is that the pay isn't always as high as in-house roles at big companies, and the work can be relentless because you'll typically be doing back-to-back audits and not much else. Most allow you to work from home full-time so at least you can put the washing on, walk the dog and make a cuppa when you need to.
For whatever reason there you'll probably find that there is a lot of neurodiversity in our industry and organisations built around accessibility work do understand that and accomodate as much as they can. If yours doesn't then honestly I'd find another. If you are good at your job there is plenty of work for you.
Generalist consultancies with accessibility practices. Big consultancies like Accenture, Deloitte, and PwC all have accessibility teams now. Pay tends to be high, the work is broad, and the experience looks impressive on a CV. The trade-off is that accessibility is a smaller part of a bigger machine, and you may find yourself as much a project manager as a tester.
Public sector. Government departments, the NHS, local authorities, the BBC, universities. Public sector accessibility is a substantial and growing area (more on this in a moment). Pay tends to be lower than the private sector at equivalent levels, but the work-life balance is often better, the pensions are excellent, and the sense of purpose is real.
Public sector accessibility
Public sector work deserves its own section because it's such a big part of the accessibility market and behaves quite differently from everything else.
Again, I'm focussing on the UK here because that's where I am, but you might have a similar experience and legislation where you are.
The Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulations 2018 require every public sector website and mobile app to meet WCAG 2.2 AA. This is a legal requirement, not a best practice. The Central Digital and Data Office (CDDO), formerly under GDS, monitors compliance and can escalate breaches. So the demand for accessibility work in this sector is baked into law and isn't going away.
That creates a substantial and stable pipeline of work. Central government departments run digital services that need continuous accessibility support. Local authorities are catching up and hiring. The NHS has multiple accessibility teams across different trusts. Universities are under pressure both from the regulations and from the growing expectations of their disabled students.
Working in public sector accessibility, in-house or as a supplier, has some specific characteristics. The bar is higher because the legal exposure is real and the audience is universal. The pace is slower because procurement, approvals, and consultation take time. The processes are more formal because there's public accountability. And the users you're serving are the entire population, which is a different responsibility from serving one company's customers.
Pay for civil service accessibility roles is set on grade bands. A specialist accessibility role at SEO grade (senior executive officer) typically pays around £43,000 to £53,000 depending on location. Higher grades pay more, and the top of the specialist ladder can push into the £70,000 to £85,000 range. Add generous pensions, holiday, and a proper commitment to work-life balance to the calculation.
For freelancers, public sector day rates are often reliable but capped. Central government uses frameworks like Digital Outcomes and Specialists, which set rate expectations for suppliers. Expect £500 to £700 a day for accessibility specialists on these frameworks, with more for senior roles. The upside is that contracts tend to be longer and payment terms are honoured.
If purpose matters to you, public sector work is one of the most direct ways to make a difference. The services you audit are used by millions of people, many of whom have no alternative. Getting them right is important.
Specialising: which routes are worth it
By year two or three you'll have started to specialise, even if you never intended to.
Web accessibility (general audits). This is where most people start and where most of the work still is. It's competitive, but it's the biggest market. If you're good at it, you'll always find work.
Mobile app accessibility. This is under-supplied. Testing native iOS and Android apps requires specific skills that a lot of web testers don't have, and demand is growing as more services move mobile-first. If you like devices and you're prepared to learn platform-specific accessibility APIs, this is a strong bet. My personal experience is that I'll normally outsource this work to someone who specialises in it as it is a different beast. Having some technical understanding of how each platform works is really important and frankly, there are people who can do it better than I can so I give it to them. So if you're good at mobile testing specifically, let people know about it.
Document accessibility. PDF, Word, PowerPoint. Unglamorous but valuable, especially in the public sector where document accessibility is a legal requirement. It's less well paid per hour than web audits but there's steady demand and less competition. A specialisation that ages well. I have done a lot of PDF tagging myself and while the tools tend to be unreliable (Acrobat, I'm looking at you), if you like sorting things then you might actually find PDF tagging theraputic. I did.
Design system and component accessibility. Working with design teams to bake accessibility in from the start, rather than testing at the end. This is where a lot of the more strategic work is heading and where a lot of my personal work currently sits. If you can pair accessibility knowledge with design credibility, you can command good rates.
Cognitive accessibility. Under-served, vulnerable customers. Requires a background in content, UX, or research more than in code. If those are your strengths, this is one of the more distinctive positions you can take.
Testing with users. Recruiting and running accessibility user research sessions with disabled participants. This is specialist work that requires care, skill, and proper participant compensation. It also happens to be the work that has the biggest impact on product decisions, because seeing real people struggle is more persuasive than any report.
Procurement, VPATs, and accessibility statements. If you're detail-oriented and don't mind formal documentation, this is quietly lucrative. Large organisations, particularly those selling into the US public sector, need Voluntary Product Accessibility Templates completed regularly, and specialists in this area can charge well for what is a relatively narrow skill set.
Training and coaching. Teaching developers, designers, content teams, and product managers how to build accessibility in. This is a career of its own, and if you enjoy teaching and speaking, it's one of the most rewarding directions to go in. Day rates for accessibility training tend to be higher than for auditing, and the work is often more sustainable because you're not staring at broken code eight hours a day. I don't do so much of this now, but there was a point in my career where this was a big chunk of my day and I found it very enjoyable and rewarding. Obviously, you need to be confident presenting to people.
Over the course of my career I've specialised in a number of different things so it's not like you're picking one for the rest of your life. You might find yourself moving naturally between specialisms as a natural part of your progression. It's a very good thing in my experience.
Sector choices
The sector you work in shapes the work as much as the specialism does. Here's a rough guide to the UK accessibility landscape by sector.
Public sector. Covered above. Substantial, stable, purpose-driven, well-paid at higher levels, sometimes slow.
Financial services. Well-funded, seriously regulated, and increasingly under pressure to comply with accessibility standards. Banks, insurers, and fintechs all hire accessibility specialists at reasonable rates.
Retail and e-commerce. Fast-moving, brand-sensitive, and increasingly regulated as the European Accessibility Act starts to bite. Retailers respond well to commercial framing (accessibility as revenue protection) and can be enjoyable clients if you can talk that language.
Media, entertainment, and gaming. Mixed. Broadcasters like the BBC take accessibility very seriously. Some streaming platforms and gaming studios do too. Others are years behind. The work here can be interesting but it's a smaller share of the market and not so many job opportunities.
Healthcare. NHS trusts, private healthcare providers, and health tech companies are all growing their accessibility work. The stakes are high (users are often ill, worried, or disabled), which makes the work meaningful but also demanding.
Education. Universities are legally required to meet accessibility standards for their online services, and many are hiring. Schools and further education colleges are fr behind where they need to be but but starting to catch up. Purpose-driven work, often at slightly lower pay than private sector equivalents.
Charity and third sector. If you can afford to take a lower rate, some of the most meaningful accessibility work is here. Charities usually can't pay top rates, but the work goes directly to people who need it and the gratitude is real.
Signs you're in the place
At various points in your career, you'll find yourself wondering whether you've made the right choices. That's normal. But there are some specific signs that suggest you might genuinely be in the wrong place and should consider changing.
You've stopped learning. If a year has gone by and you can't point to anything new you know, the environment isn't giving you what you need. Time to move.
You're spending most of your time not doing accessibility. A common trap in in-house roles is drifting into being a generalist QA person, or a project manager, because the organisation doesn't really have enough accessibility work for a full-time person. If that's happening, either negotiate a change in the role or find one that lets you actually specialise.
You're the only accessibility person and it feels lonely. It's fine to be a lone specialist for a while, but if you've been isolated for a couple of years with no peers to learn from, you'll stagnate. Get to conferences. Join a professional network. Or move somewhere with a team.
You need security. Freelance income is unpredictable in a way that's affecting your quality of work or your health. If you're constantly stressed about the next contract, or taking on work you shouldn't because you can't afford to say no, freelancing might not be the right shape for you right now. Going back to an employed role for a year or two is not a failure. It's a sensible reset.
You dread the audits. I've been here. Not the occasional dud client, everyone has those, but the actual audit work itself. If the core activity has become miserable, consider moving into training, strategy, design work, or advocacy instead. Accessibility is a big enough field that a lot of people who fell out of love with auditing found a new home somewhere else in it. How I dealt with it as a self-employed person was to promote other services so I could diversify my work more. Then auditing became a third of my work, with training, consultancy and PDFs making up the rest.
The last thing I want to say
Every choice you make about your career, employment or freelance, specialism or generalist, this sector or that one, is in service of that. If you keep that at the centre, the choices get easier. And even if you pick the wrong path first time, you'll be able to tell, because the work will feel wrong and you'll be able to change it.
Thanks
Thanks for reading this series. If any of it has been useful to you, the best compliment you can pay it is to start doing the work. This industry needs people who choose this career because they have something valuable to offer.
I've had such a long and enjoyable good career in this industry and I'm glad I picked it. It's been extremely challenging at times for lots of reasons, but I feel like it's been a good choice for me. I've learned so much and I feel like I need to pass that knowledge on.
If you'd like to be part of a mentorship programme, drop me a message. It's still coming together, but it's being built for people at exactly the point you're at now. Some paid work, some volunteer, some pairing with more experienced testers, designed to shorten the runway between "I want to do this" and "I'm doing this".
Wishing you the best of luck. I hope we get to meet soon.