Web accessibility & the EAA: what WCAG means for your business

Accessibility is not a niche topic

Roughly one in four EU adults lives with some form of disability — impaired vision, hearing, motor skills or cognition. Add temporary situations (a broken arm, a bright sun on the screen, a noisy train) and ageing eyes, and “users with limitations” describes a large slice of your customers on any given day.

An inaccessible site doesn't look broken to you — it quietly loses these visitors at the door. They can't read the low-contrast text, can't tap the tiny button, can't submit the unlabelled form. They leave, and the analytics never tell you why.

The law: European Accessibility Act

Since 28 June 2025, the European Accessibility Act (EAA) requires most e-commerce and consumer-facing digital services in the EU to be accessible, in practice meaning WCAG 2.1 level AA per the EN 301 549 standard. It applies to e-shops, banking, transport, e-books and more; microenterprises (under 10 employees and under €2M turnover) have exemptions for services.

Enforcement and penalties are set per member state. Beyond fines, inaccessible checkouts are increasingly the subject of complaints and legal claims — and fixing accessibility under legal pressure costs far more than building it in.

How WCAG works: four principles, three levels

WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) organizes requirements under four principles — content must be Perceivable, Operable, Understandable and Robust (POUR). Each requirement (“success criterion”) has a level: A (essential minimum), AA (the standard legal target), AAA (specialized, rarely required in full).

Examples: images need text alternatives (A), text needs 4.5:1 contrast (AA), everything must work by keyboard (A), forms must explain their errors (A). WCAG 2.2 added criteria like minimum target size for buttons (AA).

What automation finds — and what it can't

Automated tools like the one behind this audit reliably catch missing alt texts, unlabelled form fields, missing page language, broken ARIA and similar machine-checkable failures. That's roughly 30–50 % of WCAG criteria. The rest — is the contrast really sufficient? does keyboard navigation actually work? do the captions make sense? — needs a human test.

A practical path for most sites: fix everything the automated scan finds, then run the manual checklist from your report (it takes under an hour), then have a professional audit done if you're covered by the EAA.

Accessibility pays for itself

The overlap with SEO and AI visibility is no accident: alt texts, heading structure, link names and semantic HTML are exactly what search engines and AI systems parse. Accessible sites also convert better for everyone — clearer forms, more readable text and calmer interfaces reduce friction for every visitor, not just those with disabilities.