Who the European Accessibility Act covers and who it leaves out, who enforces it, what ignoring it costs, and ten checks you can run in an afternoon with a keyboard and a screen reader.
by Nadia Maar ·
For years, website accessibility was good practice: you did it out of care, or you didn't. Since 28 June 2025, for most online stores that sell to consumers in the EU, it is a legal requirement, with an authority that checks and fines that — in Italy — run from €5,000 to €40,000. The rule is EU Directive 2019/882, the European Accessibility Act, which Italy transposed through Legislative Decree 82 of 2022.
The curious part is that almost every problem the law asks you to fix is also a sales problem. A checkout you cannot finish without a mouse, an error nobody announces, a pale grey button on white: those are lost customers even when nobody has a disability. This piece covers who must comply, what actually needs doing, and why the best-selling shortcut — a widget you add with one line of code — is not enough.
The rules cover e-commerce services offered to consumers. An online store that sells to private customers is in, whatever platform it runs on. A portal that sells only to businesses, with no consumers, sits outside the services covered — but opening a single channel to consumers brings you back in.
Each member state sets its own enforcement. In Italy, services are overseen by AgID, the Agency for Digital Italy, which has published guidelines on the requirements. Breaching the accessibility requirements carries a fine of €5,000 to €40,000, with separate penalties for failing to cooperate with the authority or to act on its requests.
The law contains no checklist of its own: it points to a European technical standard, EN 301 549, which for websites matches WCAG 2.1 at level AA — the international guidelines for accessible web content. Translated into things you can see in an online store:
| Principle | What it means in your store |
|---|---|
| Perceivable | Every product image has alternative text that says what it shows; text stays readable when zoomed to 200%; contrast between text and background is sufficient. |
| Operable | Everything — menus, filters, basket, checkout — works with a keyboard alone, and you can always see where the focus is. |
| Understandable | Form fields have real labels, and errors say what is wrong and how to fix it, without vanishing after a second. |
| Robust | The code uses the right elements — a button is a button, a heading is a heading — so screen readers understand how the page is built. |
There is also a disclosure duty: the service has to explain how it meets the accessibility requirements, in a form that is itself accessible. In practice that means a dedicated page or a section of your terms of sale.
The product that sold best as the deadline approached is a toolbar you add with one line of code: it enlarges text, changes contrast, promises compliance. The problem is where it works. The widget acts on how the page looks, on top of the code; the defects that block a user live in the code, underneath.
If someone promises compliance without touching your store's code, they are selling you an appearance. Accessibility is achieved where the page is built, and kept every time the page changes.
Before asking anyone for a quote, it pays to know where you stand. These ten checks need no paid tools: a keyboard, your system's free screen reader — VoiceOver on a Mac, NVDA on Windows — and your store.
If the store passes the first three checks, you are better off than most. If it doesn't, the work sits in the code of the theme or front end, and that is where it needs estimating.
You almost never rebuild the store from scratch: you fix the components that repeat. An online store has few building blocks — product page, catalogue grid, filters, basket, checkout, forms — and each one, fixed once, fixes hundreds of pages. The order that makes sense:
Accessibility requirements and technical SEO overlap a great deal: structured headings, alternative text, labels, pages that work without tricks. The work you do for the law pays off in visibility too.
The first step isn't a quote: it's a check of the store you have, with the problems ranked by impact — the ones that block a purchase before the cosmetic ones.
That is what the free store audit is for: the points where your store loses, ranked by impact. And a checkout you cannot finish by keyboard is one of them.
If it sells to consumers in the EU, yes, since 28 June 2025 — unless the company is a microenterprise: fewer than ten people and, at the same time, annual turnover or a balance sheet total of no more than €2 million. A store that sells only to businesses sits outside the consumer services covered.
Each member state sets its own. In Italy, Legislative Decree 82/2022 provides fines of €5,000 to €40,000 for breaching the accessibility requirements, with separate penalties for failing to cooperate with the authority. Services are overseen by AgID.
No. A widget changes how the page looks, but the problems that block a user — buttons you can't reach by keyboard, fields with no label, errors nobody announces — live in the code, and they stay there.
The rules point to the European standard EN 301 549, which for websites matches WCAG 2.1 at level AA: content that is perceivable, operable, understandable and robust.