For consumer-facing digital services in the EU this moved from good practice to a market-access question. What gets checked first, what can be fixed in a day, and why automated tools catch less than half of it.
For years accessibility sat on the same list as recycling the office paper: obviously good, quietly postponed. In the European Union that changed. The European Accessibility Act has applied since 28 June 2025, and it covers consumer-facing digital services — online shops among them. Enforcement and penalties are set by each member state, and there are exemptions, notably for the smallest businesses providing services.
Whether your company and your product fall inside it, and what your own country expects, is a question for a lawyer in that country rather than for us. What we can tell you is the engineering part: what is actually wrong on most sites, what it takes to fix, and why the automated scan you are about to run will make you feel better than you should.
Set the rules aside for a paragraph. A meaningful share of adults have a permanent impairment of vision, hearing, motor control or cognition, and the share rises steeply with age — which, for most businesses, describes the customers with the most money.
Then add the temporary and situational version, which is everybody: a broken wrist, bright sun on a screen, a noisy train, a phone held in one hand while carrying shopping. Nearly every accessibility fix improves that experience too. A form that works with a keyboard is a form that works with autofill; captions get watched with the sound off; strong contrast survives daylight.
Nobody writes to complain that they could not use your checkout. They buy somewhere else, and it looks like an ordinary abandonment in your funnel — the same invisibility as the missing payment method.
All of those are corrections rather than rebuilds, and most of them improve conversion for everybody. That is why we treat them as regular defects rather than as a compliance project.
Custom components built out of plain containers: dropdowns, modals, tabs and accordions that look right and announce nothing. Carousels that move on their own and cannot be paused. Checkout flows assembled from clickable boxes instead of real form controls. Video with no captions. Important information available only inside a PDF.
These are days of work, sometimes weeks, and they are the argument for treating accessibility as a design-time constraint. Retrofitted into a finished interface it is expensive; decided at the start it is close to free.
Checkout. Every fault above is worse here, because this is where an obstacle costs a sale rather than a visit. A form with unlabelled fields, error messages announced only in colour and a payment step that cannot be completed with a keyboard is a checkout that quietly excludes paying customers.
Public-sector and larger-company procurement. If you sell business to business, accessibility questions increasingly appear in tenders and supplier questionnaires. Being unable to answer them is not a fine, it is a lost bid — and unlike a fine, nobody tells you it happened.
Run one — they are free and they find real problems. Then understand what they cannot see. A tool can measure contrast and spot a missing label. It cannot tell you that the tab order makes no sense, that the modal traps focus, that the alt text describes the wrong thing, or that the error message is technically present and completely unhelpful.
Automated checks catch a minority of real faults. The remainder need a person, and fifteen minutes gets you most of the way.
Put the mouse away and complete your main task — buy something, send an enquiry — using only the keyboard. Then set the browser zoom to 200% and check nothing overlaps or disappears. Then turn on the screen reader your operating system already includes and listen to one page.
That third step is uncomfortable the first time and worth more than any report. You will hear your own site described the way a portion of your customers experience it, and the priorities will arrange themselves.
Many organisations are expected to publish an accessibility statement: what standard you aim at, where you currently fall short, and how someone can report a problem and reach a human.
The temptation is to write that everything conforms. Do not. A statement that names two known gaps and gives a contact address is credible and defensible; one that claims perfection is contradicted by the first person who tries. Naming what is not done yet is also how the work gets scheduled.
Contrast, focus, keyboard paths and motion preferences are part of our definition of done, not a review at the end. Not because it is virtuous, but because the alternative is discovering it after launch, when the same fixes cost several times more and arrive with a deadline attached.
If you sell to consumers in the EU and have never run the fifteen-minute test, that is this week's task. It costs nothing, and it tells you whether you are looking at a day of corrections or a genuine project.