Accessibility
Is your online shop accessible?
Since 28 June 2025, the European Accessibility Act covers online commerce too. Paste your site's address: PostShip opens it in a real browser and tells you what gets in the way.
Test your site, no account
Colour contrast, images without text, fields without a label, mute buttons: the score out of 100 and the most serious defects, in a minute.
“We've sold online for ten years. Nobody ever told us the Pay button couldn't be reached with a keyboard.”
An accessibility defect brings no page down: the site responds, sales go through — except for the customers who cannot finish their order.
- date it applies to e-commerce services
- 28 June 2025
- the level the European standard EN 301 549 refers to
- WCAG 2.1 AA
- staff and ≤ €2M: service micro-enterprises are exempt
- < 10
- PostShip audit of your pages, and after every deploy
- 1 / day
What the law asks
Directive (EU) 2019/882 sets accessibility requirements for a list of products and services, online commerce among them; each member state has transposed it into its own law. What follows is a summary, not legal advice.
Who is concerned
Businesses that sell online to consumers in the Union. Service micro-enterprises — fewer than ten people and a turnover or balance sheet of at most two million euros — are exempt.
What to reach
A site that is perceivable, operable, understandable and robust: the four WCAG principles. The harmonised standard EN 301 549 refers to WCAG 2.1, level AA — the benchmark most checks use.
What to state
The service must explain, in the information it gives the public, how it meets the accessibility requirements. A statement that does not match the site protects you from nothing.
What to check with a lawyer
Penalties, the supervising authority and deadlines depend on the country. For your exact case, ask a lawyer — PostShip tells you what is wrong on the site, not what the law says.
What PostShip sees, and what it doesn't
axe-core, the reference engine for automated audits, in the page as a browser renders it. It quickly finds the defects that can be measured; it does not replace a human audit.
Colour contrast
Light grey text on white, a pale button: measured in the rendered page, at the 4.5:1 threshold (3:1 for large text). It is the web's most common defect, and the easiest to fix.
Images, fields, buttons
An image without alternative text, a field without a label, an icon button without a name: a screen reader announces “button, button, button”. Each defect comes with the offending element.
Structure
The page language, heading order, misassembled ARIA roles, tables without headers, blocked zoom: what makes a page navigable without seeing it.
What no robot judges
Alternative text that means nothing, an illogical keyboard path, an incomprehensible instruction: that takes a human. An automated audit finds part of the defects, not all of them.
After the test: every day, and after every deploy
A site accessible on Monday may not be on Tuesday: an updated theme, a redesigned button. In a PostShip project, your pages are audited every day and right after every release, with the score over time and each defect with its element.
The audit documentation