Accessibility: in force since June 2025
E-commerce has to meet WCAG 2.1 level AA. There is a microenterprise exemption, and it is worth knowing which side of the line you are on before somebody asks.
Since 28 June 2025, e-commerce aimed at consumers must be accessible under the applicable technical standard, which in practice is WCAG 2.1 level AA. Microenterprises with fewer than ten people and under two million euros of turnover are exempt when providing services.
Accessibility isn’t about bolting on a toolbar with contrast buttons. It is about the page working with a keyboard, a screen reader announcing fields by name, text scaling up without the layout falling apart, and colour never being the only way something is said.
The reference standard is WCAG 2.1 at level AA. It sounds like a thousand-page document, and it is, but on a small retail site ninety per cent of the work sits in five places: the menu, the forms, the checkout, the images and the contrast.
The microenterprise exemption is real, but it isn’t a blank cheque: it covers service provision and doesn’t exempt you from the rest of consumer law. And if you grow, it stops applying without anyone telling you.
Who it applies to
E-commerce aimed at consumers in the European Union, and some further services. If you sell online and have ten people or more, or turn over more than two million, you are in scope without argument. Below both thresholds you are exempt for service provision — and it is still worth doing, because the same work is what makes the shop usable on a phone in bright sunlight.
What we do
What it means in your trade
-
Neighbourhood retail and services
The online shop is squarely in scope. The thing that fails most often is checkout: steps that only work with a mouse, validation errors a screen reader never announces, and button contrast that doesn’t reach.
-
Bars and restaurants
The digital menu is the place to look. A scanned PDF is inaccessible by definition, and a menu as an image is read by nobody. Menu in HTML with allergens as text solves nearly all of it.
-
Tourism and nautical
The booking engine is a long form in several languages, which is the combination with the most surface area for failure. The calendar is usually the first thing to break under keyboard use.
-
Salons and clinics
Online booking has the same problem as the booking engine: calendars and time pickers that only understand a mouse. Fixable, but it has to be looked at.
-
Firms and practices
Documents are the forgotten part. A PDF of fees or terms also has to be accessible, and almost none are straight out of a word processor.
-
Trades and workshops
If you sell or take payment on the site, you are in scope. If the site is purely informational and you are under the threshold you aren’t obliged — but the quote form is exactly where people get lost.
Questions about accessibility
If your question isn’t here, write to us and we’ll answer it. Contact
Is an accessibility plugin enough?
No. Overlay bars and widgets don’t fix the code underneath, and several screen-reader user organisations advise against them specifically because they interfere with the assistive technology already built into the operating system. They make it look done rather than make it done.
I’m a microenterprise. So I do nothing?
Legally you can be exempt for service provision. Even so, the basic fixes — contrast, text size, labelled forms, keyboard navigation — cost very little when done while the site is being built, and they help everyone, not only screen-reader users.
How do I know if my site conforms?
An automated validator catches part of it, roughly a third. The rest shows up when you try to buy something using only the keyboard, and when you listen to the page with a screen reader. That is the first thing we do and it is what produces the real fix list.
What does fixing it cost?
Far less during the build than afterwards. On an existing site it depends how much of the checkout has to be touched; we give you the number after the audit, and if what you have can’t reasonably be fixed we say so rather than billing you for patches.
Can your shop be used with a keyboard alone?
Try it for a minute: tab from the top down to the pay button. If it gets lost on the way, write to us and we’ll tell you what fixing it would cost.
- Or directly
- hola@appnweb.site
- Monday to Friday, 09:00 – 18:00 (CET)