Website and e-shop accessibility in 2026: what is at stake and what to fix
The short version. The European Accessibility Act (Directive 2019/882) has applied since 28 June 2025 and real enforcement started in June 2026. Penalty frameworks differ by country; in Slovakia they range from 10 000 to 100 000 EUR depending on severity and company size. If you sell online or provide banking or transport services, this concerns you.
Why you are hearing about it only now
The first year was about transposition into national law, the second is about enforcement. As of June 2026 no confirmed fines under national EAA laws could be verified. Supervision so far runs through complaints, notices, injunctions and market surveillance with deadlines to fix the problem.
That is both good news and bad news. Good, because nobody sends a fine without warning. Bad, because the scenario is predictable: a complaint arrives, you get a deadline, and within that deadline the site must be fixed. Fixing accessibility is not a weekend of button colours.
June 2026 showed where this ends. A French court ordered Carrefour to make both its e-commerce site and its mobile app accessible, with six months to comply and the threat of daily penalties.
Who is covered
- online shops and e-commerce, including the checkout flow
- banking and payment services, payment terminals
- passenger transport and booking systems
- electronic communications, e-books, audiovisual services
- mobile apps delivering those services
The directive exempts microenterprises providing services (roughly under 10 employees and under 2 million EUR turnover). The exemption does not cover products and should be assessed case by case.
What it means in practice
The technical benchmark is EN 301 549, which in practice leads to WCAG 2.1 level AA:
| Area | What is checked | Typical finding |
|---|---|---|
| Contrast | at least 4.5:1 for text | light grey on white |
| Keyboard | whole site usable without a mouse | modal you cannot escape |
| Forms | every field labelled, errors understandable | placeholder instead of a label |
| Images | meaningful alternative text | alt=”image1.jpg” |
| Structure | logical heading order | five H1s on one page |
| Focus | visible focus indicator | outline: none in CSS |
| Video | captions and transcript | company video without captions |
| Time limits | nothing unstoppable | cart countdown with no extension |
The most expensive parts to fix are booking and checkout flows, because custom code, a payment gateway and a carrier all meet there. The cheapest fix is the one done during design.
A sensible order of work
- Audit against WCAG 2.1 AA. Automated tools catch roughly a third; the rest needs manual testing with a keyboard and a screen reader.
- Prioritise by money. The path to an order and to contact first.
- Fix. Part is CSS and templates, part is content, part is logic.
- Publish an accessibility statement and set an internal process so it does not decay.
- Check on every change. Accessibility is a state, not a project.
If you are building from scratch it is significantly cheaper. In our web development and e-commerce work accessibility is handled in the design phase rather than patched later.
The side effect nobody mentions
An accessible site is also easier for search engines and language models to read. Meaningful headings, image descriptions, text alternatives and clean structure are exactly what AI search builds answers from. The investment pays back twice, and a third time in conversions: clear forms and error messages help everyone, not only users with disabilities.
FAQ
Is an accessibility widget enough? No. Overlays address cosmetics, not the cause, and have themselves been the subject of disputes. The problem lives in the code and the content.
How fast do I need this? The obligation already applies. Real pressure arrives with a complaint and a short deadline.
Does it cover mobile apps? Yes, if the app delivers a covered service. The Carrefour case included the app.
How much does it cost? It depends on the state of the site. Get in touch and we can look at the specifics.
This summarises publicly available sources as of 28 August 2026 and is not legal advice.
