In June 2025, the European Accessibility Act became enforceable. If you sell products or services online to customers in the EU, this law applies to you. Not eventually. Not “when you get around to it.” Right now.
And yet, the majority of e-commerce sites we audit still fail basic accessibility checks. Not edge cases - fundamental issues like missing form labels, broken keyboard navigation, and images without alt text. Things that make your store literally unusable for people with disabilities.
This isn’t just a moral problem anymore. It’s a legal one.
What the European Accessibility Act Actually Requires
The EAA (Directive 2019/882) mandates that products and services sold in the EU must be accessible to people with disabilities. For online stores, this means your website needs to comply with WCAG 2.1 at minimum Level AA.
If you’ve never heard of WCAG, here’s the short version: it’s a set of guidelines that define what makes a website usable by people who are blind, deaf, have motor disabilities, or cognitive impairments. Things like being able to navigate your entire site with a keyboard. Making sure screen readers can understand your content. Ensuring color contrast is sufficient for people with low vision.
The law covers e-commerce services specifically. If you operate an online shop - whether it’s built on WooCommerce, Shopify, or a custom platform - and you serve EU customers, you need to comply.
The Consequences Are Real
Some businesses treat accessibility the same way they treated GDPR before the fines started rolling in: as a theoretical risk not worth addressing. That was a mistake with GDPR, and it’ll be a mistake here too.
Each EU member state is responsible for enforcement, and penalties vary by country. But the pattern is clear: fines, mandatory remediation orders, and in some jurisdictions, private individuals can file complaints or lawsuits directly.
If you want a preview of what’s coming, look at the United States. Over 4,500 web accessibility lawsuits were filed in 2023 alone under the ADA. E-commerce sites were the most targeted category. The same legal infrastructure is now being built across Europe.
The businesses that get hit hardest aren’t the ones with the worst sites - they’re the ones that ignored the problem until someone noticed.
What We Actually Find When We Audit E-commerce Sites
We’ve run accessibility audits on dozens of WordPress and WooCommerce sites. The same issues come up over and over:
Checkout flows that break without a mouse. Try completing a purchase on your site using only a keyboard. Tab through the form fields. Can you select a shipping method? Can you apply a coupon code? Can you submit payment? On most sites we audit, the answer is no. For someone who can’t use a mouse - due to tremors, paralysis, or any number of conditions - this means they physically cannot buy from you.
Product images with no alt text. Screen readers describe images to blind users using alt text. When your product images have no alt text - or worse, alt text that says “IMG_4392.jpg” - a blind customer has no idea what you’re selling. This is the most common issue we find, and the easiest to fix.
Form errors that nobody can find. When a customer fills out a checkout form incorrectly, your site shows an error. But if that error is only indicated by a red border or a small text change with no focus management, a screen reader user won’t know something went wrong. They’ll sit there wondering why the form won’t submit.
Popup overlays that trap focus. Cookie banners, email signup modals, sale notifications - these popups frequently trap keyboard focus, meaning a user physically cannot dismiss them or interact with the page behind them. We’ve seen sites where a cookie banner makes the entire store unusable for keyboard-only users.
Low color contrast on key elements. Light gray text on a white background might look minimal and clean. It’s also unreadable for the 300 million people worldwide with some form of color vision deficiency. Buttons, links, form labels, error messages - if the contrast ratio is below 4.5:1, it fails WCAG and it fails your customers.
The Overlay Trap
If your response to accessibility is installing an overlay widget - those toolbar plugins that promise one-click compliance - stop.
Overlay widgets don’t make your site accessible. They add a layer on top of an inaccessible site and claim to fix it. In reality, they often make things worse. They can interfere with actual assistive technology. They create a separate, degraded experience. And critically, they don’t satisfy legal requirements. Courts in the US have already ruled that overlays don’t constitute compliance. The EU will follow the same reasoning.
The National Federation of the Blind has explicitly spoken out against overlays. Major accessibility organizations consider them harmful. If an agency or tool vendor tells you an overlay solves your accessibility obligations, they’re either uninformed or dishonest.
Real accessibility means fixing your actual code: semantic HTML, proper ARIA attributes, keyboard event handlers, focus management, and content structure that makes sense without visual context.
What Compliance Actually Looks Like
Here’s the good news: making a WordPress or WooCommerce site accessible isn’t a complete rebuild. For most sites, it’s a focused remediation project. The work falls into a few clear categories:
Structural fixes. Proper heading hierarchy, landmark regions, semantic HTML elements. This is the foundation - it tells screen readers how your page is organized.
Interactive element repairs. Every button, link, form field, dropdown, and modal needs to be operable via keyboard and properly announced to assistive technology. This is where most of the effort goes on e-commerce sites because checkout flows are complex.
Content updates. Alt text for images, descriptive link text (not “click here”), proper table headers, captions for videos. This is ongoing work that your content team needs to own.
Testing and validation. Automated tools catch about 30% of accessibility issues. The rest require manual testing - actual keyboard navigation testing, screen reader testing, and ideally, testing with real users who have disabilities.
A Practical Starting Point
If you’re not sure where your site stands, here’s what we recommend:
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Run an automated scan. Tools like axe, WAVE, or Lighthouse will surface the obvious issues - missing alt text, contrast failures, missing form labels. This takes minutes and gives you a baseline.
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Test your checkout with a keyboard. Unplug your mouse and try to buy something. If you get stuck at any point, your customers are getting stuck there too. This single test reveals more than any automated tool.
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Get a proper audit. Automated tools miss the majority of real-world accessibility issues. A manual WCAG 2.1 AA audit by someone who knows what they’re looking at will give you a clear remediation roadmap with priorities.
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Fix the high-impact issues first. Checkout flow, navigation, product pages, forms. These are where customers interact most and where accessibility failures cost you the most - both legally and in lost revenue.
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Build accessibility into your process. One-time fixes aren’t enough. Every new page, product, or feature needs to maintain compliance. This means training your team, updating your content guidelines, and including accessibility checks in your workflow.
This Is Also a Business Opportunity
Let’s set aside the legal risk for a moment. Globally, people with disabilities represent a market with over $13 trillion in annual disposable income. When your competitors’ sites are inaccessible and yours works perfectly for everyone, that’s not just compliance - it’s a competitive advantage.
The accessibility improvements that help disabled users - clear navigation, readable text, logical page structure, fast load times - also improve the experience for everyone. They improve your SEO. They reduce bounce rates. They increase conversions.
Every site we’ve made accessible has seen measurable improvements in overall usability metrics, not just accessibility scores.
The Clock Isn’t Ticking - It’s Already Run Out
The EAA is enforceable now. Every day your site remains non-compliant is a day you’re exposed - to legal action, to lost customers, and to a reputation hit that’s harder to fix than any code issue.
We’ve helped businesses across industries get their WordPress and WooCommerce sites to WCAG 2.1 AA compliance. Not with overlays or quick fixes, but with proper remediation that actually works and holds up to scrutiny.
If you’re not sure where you stand, start with an audit. Know your gaps. Build a plan. Fix the critical issues first. The cost of doing it now is a fraction of the cost of doing it after someone files a complaint.