Accessibility Specialist
Also known as: Digital Accessibility Specialist, A11y Specialist, Accessibility Engineer
Ensure digital products are usable by everyone, including people with disabilities, through inclusive design and testing.
Salary Range
The highest-paid specialization or seniority level for accessibility specialists.
About 1 in 50 reaches this level
Small field of ~8-15K specialists (est., no BLS code); Director of Accessibility at $235K at big tech is achievable, maybe 150-250 roles.
Salary data based on 2025 BLS, Glassdoor, and industry reports. Actual compensation varies by location, experience, and employer.
How to Become One
This career typically requires a bachelor's degree. Here are the top colleges for it:
Cost to Qualify
Four years of tuition and required fees runs about $56K at a typical public college in our list (in-state) and about $288K at a typical private one. Both are pricier than the US national averages (about $48K public in-state, $180K private nonprofit, College Board 2025-26) because our 161-college dataset only includes nationally-ranked schools, not every US college. This excludes room and board, which we show separately on each college's page.
Sticker price, not what most people pay — scholarships, aid and in-state status all move it. Room and board is shown separately on each college's page.
AI Risk Assessment
Accessibility specialists make websites, apps and documents usable for people with disabilities, such as people who are blind and use screen readers or who can't use a mouse. They test products against the international accessibility standard (WCAG), explain problems to designers and developers, fix code and train teams. The need is huge. WebAIM, an accessibility group based at Utah State University, tested the home pages of the top one million websites in February 2026 and found detectable failures of the standard on 95.9% of them, up from 94.8% a year earlier. It counted an average of 56 errors per page, 10% more than in 2025, and says one likely reason is that sites are getting more complex, partly because of AI-assisted coding. Laws add demand. The European Accessibility Act has applied to many products and services sold in the EU since 28 June 2025. In the US, the Justice Department's rule requiring state and local government websites to meet the standard has been delayed: in April 2026 it moved the deadline to April 2027 for larger governments and April 2028 for smaller ones.
AI helps with part of the work. Automated checkers already scan pages for common problems, and much of the fixing is web coding, one of the kinds of work AI can help with most: a 2025 Microsoft Research study of how much of each job's tasks AI chatbots can help with put web developers in the top 3% of 785 jobs. But WebAIM stresses that automated tools cannot detect every failure, and a page with no detected errors is not necessarily accessible. Judging whether a real person using a screen reader can actually get through a task still takes human testing. The evidence we found leans toward a 2: rising need and new laws, with AI helping rather than replacing. We keep it at 3 because there is no government job category or hiring data for this career, the US deadline has slipped, and the routine checks and code fixes that newcomers usually start on are the tasks AI tools are best placed to take over.
What would change this score. If hiring for accessibility roles grows as the EU and US rules take effect, this should come down to 2. If AI tools start reliably finding and fixing most accessibility problems on their own, so companies rely on software instead of specialists, it goes to 4.
Sources
Ratings reflect a 10-year outlook based on 2025-2026 research, weighted toward entry-level impact. Individual outcomes will vary.
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