Every new plugin, theme change and promotional banner pushed live on a Friday afternoon can undo part of those fixes. Stores audited soon after the rules started applying are often non compliant again today, and nobody in the company knows it. Below: how to check this yourself in fifteen minutes, what breaks most often, and how to plug accessibility into ongoing store care.
What the rules say, in short
Directive (EU) 2019/882, the European Accessibility Act, has applied since 28 June 2025 in all member states and covers electronic commerce: online stores, sales platforms and shopping apps. Microenterprises providing services are excluded, meaning fewer than 10 people plus annual turnover or balance sheet total no higher than 2 million EUR. A store doing from 250,000 to 3.5 million USD in annual revenue with more than ten people on the payroll is not covered by that exclusion.
The reference standard is WCAG 2.1, in practice level AA, together with EN 301 549.
What the directive does not settle: the supervising authority, the inspection procedure and the level of penalties are set nationally and differ between countries, so check the rules in your own country and in the countries you sell into. Outside the European Union other accessibility regimes apply, and the 28 June 2025 date does not concern them.
The disclaimer this text would be dishonest without: we are not a law firm and this is not legal advice. Whether these rules apply to your business, and how far, is a question for a lawyer.
The fifteen minutes that tell you whether you have a problem
No tool and no consultant. A keyboard and fifteen minutes.
Push the mouse aside and do not touch it. Open the home page and walk the whole purchase path using only Tab, Shift with Tab, Enter and the space bar. Close the cookie consent window. Enter a category, open a product page, pick a variant, add it to the cart, go to checkout, fill in your details, choose delivery and reach payment. If you get stuck anywhere, if you cannot see which element you are on, or if focus falls into a window you cannot leave, you have your answer. No report is needed to confirm it.
The second test takes a minute: zoom the page to 200 percent. Check whether texts overlap, whether buttons run off the screen and whether the purchase can still be completed. Third test: turn off image loading in the browser and look at a product page and a category listing. What is left on screen is roughly what a person using a screen reader gets. If you see file names or blank spaces where photos should be, alternative descriptions do not exist.
Ten things that break accessibility in stores most often
- Missing alternative text on product photos. Usually because the wholesaler import never fills it in and nobody decided who writes it.
- Text and buttons with too little contrast. The records are set on promotional banners: white text on a bright photo, a grey price on beige.
- Form fields without associated labels. Visually the caption is there, technically it is not tied to the field, so the screen reader announces an empty box inside checkout.
- Error messages signalled by colour alone. A red border with no text says nothing to someone who does not distinguish that colour.
- A keyboard trap in the cookie window and in modal windows. Focus goes in and cannot be taken out, so the store ends there.
- Carousels that cannot be stopped. A slider advancing by itself every few seconds blocks anyone who reads more slowly than the designer assumed.
- No visible focus indicator. The outline was switched off in the theme because it spoiled the aesthetics, and with it went the information about where you are.
- Headings used as decoration. Large text marked as a second level heading only because it had to be large, while the product name stays an ordinary paragraph.
- Filters and product variants operated by mouse only. Size selection on tiles that respond to a click but cannot be reached with the Tab key.
- No accessibility statement and no contact channel. The only point here invisible in the interface, and usually the only one nobody remembers.
Why an audit once a year fixes nothing
Imagine a store that got an audit report three months ago and implemented every fix. Over the next quarter it goes through what every store goes through. Marketing installs a reviews plugin, which brings its own widget with its own stars that the keyboard cannot operate. A designer prepares a sale banner and picks colours for looks, not for contrast. A marketing app drops a discount code popup on entry that cannot be closed without a mouse. Somebody updates the theme, and the update overwrites the files where the audit fixes lived.
None of those four things is a mistake or anybody's negligence. That is normal work on a store. The problem is that each happens between one audit and the next, and none leaves an alert behind. The store looks the same, sells the same and is non compliant. That is why we treat accessibility like backups or security updates: a repeatable item in the schedule, not a project with an end date.
How to plug this into regular store care
Four things are enough to keep a store from drifting away from compliance between audits.
A keyboard test of the whole purchase path once a quarter, plus one after every larger deployment: a theme change, a checkout swap, a plugin touching the cart, checkout or login. The same fifteen minutes described above, only performed regularly and with a note on what changed.
An automated scan alongside deployments, with an honest caveat: such tools catch only part of the problems. They will find missing alternative text, contrast and unlabelled fields. They will not judge whether an alternative description makes sense, whether the focus order is logical or whether the purchase can be completed. A scan is a sieve, not an audit.
A content rule, written down and binding on the people who add products and banners: alternative text on every new product photo, contrast checked on every new banner before publication. This point needs no developer, but it most often decides the outcome.
An update of the accessibility statement so that it matches reality, with a working contact channel for people reporting a problem.
How many hours this really takes
For a medium sized store this is roughly from 3 to 5 hours per quarter: about an hour for the keyboard test of the full path, half an hour each for checks after larger deployments, an hour for the scan and its results, the rest for small fixes and the statement. Fixes found along the way are settled from the hour pool.
At 25 USD per hour inside a package that is roughly from 75 to 125 USD per quarter, about one to two hours a month. In Basic at 250 USD (10 h) that is around one tenth of the pool, in Advanced at 500 USD (20 h) one twentieth, in Premium at 1,000 USD (40 h) an amount you will not notice in the usage report. Putting a store in order for the first time costs more and usually needs a separate quote: holding the state is cheap, reaching it from zero is not.
What this gives you beyond compliance
We do not promise higher sales or a percentage by which conversion grows, because nobody can honestly calculate that for your store. Three things can be verified.
First, a larger share of customers finish the purchase. Keyboards are used not only by people with disabilities, but by everyone filling a form quickly without reaching for the mouse, and low contrast is fought by everyone looking at a phone in the sun.
Second, accessibility fixes usually improve page structure for search engines too: correct headings, sensible alternative descriptions and readable labels are the same work done when cleaning up semantics.
Third, an accessibility statement is sometimes required in tenders and in sales to public institutions, where its absence is simply a missing document in your bid.
Where to start when the store is far from compliant
Order matters, because budget and time are finite.
The purchase path first: cart, checkout, payment and login. Then the product page and category listings. The rest of the site last, meaning information pages, the blog and the terms.
The reasoning is simple: you fix what blocks sales first. An inaccessible about page is a compliance problem. An inaccessible checkout is a compliance problem and the place where a customer who wanted to buy leaves without buying. If you do one thing this quarter, do the checkout.
We can plug an accessibility review of your purchase path into ongoing care for your store as a repeatable quarterly item, settled from your hour pool. Write to us through /en/sla-help-desk with the store address and its platform. We will tell you how many hours from the pool this takes in your case and where we would start.