Is Your Online Store Accessible Enough for the European Accessibility Act?

Accessibility in eCommerce is no longer only a UX topic or a technical checklist. For online merchants selling to customers in the EU, it affects trust, conversion, and legal compliance.

When accessibility is missing, the impact is practical. A customer may be unable to open a menu, use product filters, understand a form error, add a product to the cart, or complete payment. A barrier at any of these points can mean losing a customer who was ready to buy.

At Kiwee, we see accessibility as part of the full shopping journey, not as a check limited to the homepage. Navigation, product discovery, forms, checkout, payment, and mobile layouts all need to work for customers using different devices and assistive technologies.

The EAA Makes Accessibility Harder to Ignore

The European Accessibility Act has made accessibility more urgent for online stores serving EU customers. From 28 June 2025, covered eCommerce services must meet accessibility requirements across the digital shopping journey.

This goes beyond adding alt text to a few images. Accessibility needs to be considered across product and category pages, search, filters, cart, checkout, customer accounts, forms, payment flows, and customer service touchpoints.

In Germany, these requirements are implemented through the Barrierefreiheitsstärkungsgesetz, or BFSG, which has applied to covered consumer services since 28 June 2025. This gives merchants serving the German market a clear national legal framework for accessibility.

For merchants, the practical question is simple: can all customers use the store from browsing to checkout without unnecessary barriers?

When the answer is unclear, a structured accessibility audit is the most reliable first step. It shows where the store stands today, which barriers matter most, and what should be fixed first.

Carrefour France Shows That Enforcement Is Becoming Real

On 4 June 2026, the Tribunal judiciaire de Caen ordered Carrefour France to make its eCommerce website and mobile app fully accessible within six months. The ruling included a financial penalty for each day of delay after the deadline. It is a clear sign that accessibility obligations are moving from policy into enforcement.

The point is not to create panic. It is to recognise that accessibility is becoming a concrete business and compliance risk rather than something retailers can leave for later.

Waiting until the issue becomes urgent makes the work harder to plan, harder to prioritise, and usually more expensive to fix quickly.

Start With an Accessibility Audit

Accessibility can feel broad and technical, especially for eCommerce stores with many templates, plugins, integrations, and checkout steps. A structured audit turns that complexity into a clear plan.

Instead of starting with assumptions or a long list from an automated tool, your team gets a view of the current risks, the most important customer journey blockers, and the actions that should come first.

This creates a practical basis for remediation, budgeting, and implementation without trying to fix everything at once.

How Accessibility Is Evaluated

Accessibility is usually evaluated against recognised standards such as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. For most commercial websites, WCAG 2.2 Level AA is the practical benchmark used to assess whether content and functionality are perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust.

Automated Accessibility Scans

Automated scans help identify detectable issues such as missing labels, contrast failures, and invalid markup. They are useful for coverage and consistency, but they only reveal part of the picture.

Manual Expert Review

Manual review checks how the interface behaves in practice. This includes heading structure, keyboard focus, forms and error messages, interactive components, dialogs, and compatibility with assistive technologies.

Key shopping journeys should also be tested from product discovery through checkout and payment. The central question is whether a real customer can complete the journey independently.

The findings should then be prioritised by severity, legal relevance, customer impact, and business risk so teams know what needs immediate attention and what can be planned later.

Why Automated Accessibility Tools Are Not Enough

Automated tools are valuable, but a scan cannot confirm whether a checkout error is understandable, a filter is usable by keyboard, a modal keeps focus correctly, or the complete path to payment works with a screen reader.

That is why reliable accessibility testing combines automated checks with manual expert review and testing of the most important customer journeys.

How Kiwee Runs Your Audit

Kiwee's Accessibility Audit helps online merchants understand where their store stands today, what is blocking customers, and what should be fixed first.

Depending on the store's size and needs, we review selected key pages or the complete shopping journey. The audit combines automated checks, manual WCAG 2.2 AA review, keyboard testing, screen reader checks, and journey-based testing.

The output is a clear list of accessibility issues, severity levels, developer-friendly recommendations, and a prioritised remediation roadmap. Your team receives decisions and next steps, not only a technical export from a scanning tool.

Where needed, we can also support accessibility statement preparation and implementation sprints for priority fixes.

The goal is simple: give your team clarity before making changes and help you focus resources on the barriers that carry the greatest customer and business impact.

If you are not sure whether your online store is ready for the European Accessibility Act or Germany's BFSG, Kiwee's Accessibility Audit is a practical first step.

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