Accessibility audit and fix service for SaaS product teams

A product manager at a mid-market SaaS company gets a support ticket — or worse, a churn note — saying the dashboard is hard to use because the contrast is too low and the color choices make it hard to distinguish between states. They know the complaint is valid. They've heard it internally. But their engineering backlog is full of features, and 'fix the color palette' never rises to the top because it's hard to scope, harder to test, and the PM doesn't have the vocabulary to make it feel urgent to an engineer.

The reason this gap persists is structural: design systems are usually built once by a founding designer and then inherited by engineers who treat visual style as a black box. When the complaints come in — 'the GUI is hard to read due to the palette chosen,' 'the UI lacks contrast,' 'the color scheme is horrible' — there's no clear owner and no clear process. It's not a bug ticket with a binary fix. The buyer here (the VP of Product or CTO) often doesn't experience the UI the same way end users do, so the urgency never translates upward.

What's missing is a service that takes the actual codebase or design system, audits every color combination against WCAG contrast ratios and real-world readability standards, and delivers a prioritized fix list with implementation-ready replacements — not a PDF report, but actual updated CSS variables or design tokens the engineer can drop in. The difference between a report and a ready-to-ship fix is the difference between something that sits in a folder and something that gets merged this sprint.

This recurs because design systems drift. Every time a new component is added, a new color is introduced, and the palette degrades again. Companies that fix this once need a periodic audit to stay fixed — which means the engagement doesn't end after the first project.

What to build

Build a service that ingests a SaaS product's CSS or Figma design system, programmatically audits every color pairing against WCAG AA/AAA and perceptual readability models, and delivers a corrected token set plus a prioritized list of component-level changes with before/after previews — delivered in two weeks, not as a report but as a pull request.

Where to start

Target SaaS products built on Tailwind CSS specifically, where the design token structure is predictable and the audit-to-fix pipeline can be nearly fully automated, making the unit economics work from the first client.

The hard part

Scope creep is brutal — clients will conflate 'fix our contrast' with 'redesign our product,' and the service has to be ruthlessly narrow or it becomes an unprofitable custom design engagement every time.

How it makes money

Fixed-price project fee ($3,000–$8,000 depending on codebase size) for the initial audit and fix delivery, with an optional $500/month recurring contract to re-audit on a quarterly basis as the product evolves.