Accessibility audits & remediation for EU e-commerce & SaaS
Your checkout has bugs only some of your customers can see.
European regulators test one thing: can a customer using a screen reader or a keyboard actually finish an order? We run that same test on your shop, then fix what fails. You get a 40-page PDF a widget merged pull requests, plus conformance documentation that describes work that really happened.
Fixed quotes, agreed before work starts. No hourly meter.
61% of the largest Dutch webshops fail the regulator’s core test: an order cannot be completed with assistive technology. Source: ACM sweep of the top 100 NL webshops, 2025
97% of audited EU e-commerce sites have material WCAG failures. Your competitors are not ahead of you. Yet. Source: 200-site EU e-commerce benchmark, 2026
0 EAA fines issued so far, anywhere in the EU. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling with fear. We prefer selling with diffs. Enforcement status as of July 2026, details below
The problem, audibly
Four buttons walk into a checkout. None of them says what it does.
Roughly one in four Europeans has a disability. Many of them shop with a screen reader, which reads your page out loud. Here is what your product page probably sounds like today, next to what it should sound like.
What a screen reader hears today
- “image”
- “button”
- “button”
- “link”
- “€ eight nine point zero zero button”
Which button buys the shoe? Which one empties the cart? Nobody knows. That customer is now shopping somewhere else.
What it hears after our patches
- “Blue Runner sneaker, product image”
- “Select size, collapsed, button”
- “Add Blue Runner sneaker to cart, button”
- “View cart, 1 item, link”
- “Price: 89 euros”
Same shop, same design, same conversion funnel. It simply works for everyone now. This is also exactly what regulators test.
The other test: put the mouse away
Plenty of your customers navigate by keyboard alone. Every control on your site has to be reachable with the Tab key and show where the focus is. Watch the ring. If your site has no ring, that is finding number one.
Know your options
The three things the accessibility industry will sell you
The overlay widget
- One line of JavaScript that promises instant compliance.
- The US FTC fined the biggest vendor $1M over that promise.
- The European Disability Forum says overlays do not satisfy EU law.
problem solved problem, with a widget on top
The audit PDF
- A thorough, often genuinely good report.
- It ends with 300 findings assigned to your developers.
- Who have a roadmap, a backlog, and no accessibility specialist.
fixed documented in great detail
AccessPatched
- The same rigorous audit, using the WCAG-EM methodology and real assistive tech.
- Then we write the fixes and open pull requests to your codebase.
- Your team reviews and merges. That is their whole job in this.
merged, with the evidence log to prove it
To be clear: audits themselves are valuable, and we sell them gladly. The thing we refuse to sell is an audit dressed up as a finish line.
What you can buy
The whole path, or just the piece you need
Most clients take the full route from audit to merged fixes. Every step also stands on its own, and starting small is a fine strategy. Each comes with a fixed quote before work begins.
Audit & report
- Full WCAG 2.1 AA evaluation of your critical user journeys, WCAG-EM methodology, automated tooling plus real assistive-technology testing.
- Written for developers: every finding includes a ready-to-apply code snippet, so your own team can fix things without us.
- Reports in English, Dutch, or German.
for teams that fix in-house
Remediation pull requests
- We implement the fixes in your stack and open PRs, each mapped to the WCAG criterion it resolves.
- Your developers review and merge; nothing ships without their sign-off.
- Works from our audit or from one you already have.
for teams that want it done
Conformance documentation
- EN 301 549 conformance documentation and an accessibility statement, prepared for publication under your name.
- VPAT/ACR for enterprise procurement, the document your sales team keeps being asked for.
- Backed by an evidence log, not a badge.
for procurement and regulators
Monitoring
- Every release re-tested against the same standard.
- Regressions caught and patched before they age into findings.
- Your evidence log stays current, so audits stop being an event.
for staying fixed
How it works
Scan → audit → patch → prove
-
Scan free, no strings
Send us your URL and we run the same automated checks regulators start with, then send you the top findings in plain language. If your shop passes, we say so and leave you alone. It happens, occasionally.
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Audit
A full WCAG 2.1 AA evaluation of your purchase funnel, following W3C’s WCAG-EM methodology. Automated tooling plus a human completing real journeys with a screen reader and a keyboard. Automated scans alone catch roughly a third of what matters; the manual work is where audits earn their keep.
-
Patch
We write the fixes in your stack. Shopify themes, React, Vue, Rails, PHP, whatever you run. Each pull request maps to the WCAG criterion it resolves, and your developers review every line before anything ships. Nothing about your design changes without your sign-off.
-
Prove
You receive EN 301 549 conformance documentation and an accessibility statement, published under your name as EU law requires. Behind it sits an evidence log: what was tested, what was fixed, when, and in which commit. If a regulator or an enterprise procurement team ever asks, you have a paper trail rather than a badge.
The regulatory weather report
Where enforcement actually stands
The European Accessibility Act has applied to e-commerce since June 2025. Here is the honest status per market as of July 2026, free of scare tactics.
| Country | What’s actually happening |
|---|---|
| Netherlands | The ACM tested the 100 largest webshops, found 61% fail its core test, sent information requests, and has announced formal enforcement steps from mid-2026. |
| Sweden | PTS runs the EU’s most systematic program: 28 named companies under active supervision and around 200 platforms being audited through Q3 2026. The case list is public. |
| Germany | The federal market surveillance body (MLBF) entered its active control phase in January 2026. Separately, two waves of private Abmahnung letters have already hit online shops. |
| France | In June 2026 a court ordered Carrefour to make its site and app fully accessible within six months, under a daily penalty. The ruling states that partial accessibility is not sufficient. |
The part vendors don’t say out loud
No EAA fines have been issued yet, anywhere. What exists today is regulators testing, naming, and ordering; courts compelling; and law firms warming up. So you still have the cheap option: fix it once, calmly, on your own schedule. The expensive option is doing the same work in six months, under a court deadline, at panic prices. We think that is a better pitch than pretending a fine is in the mail.
Who you’re dealing with
Judge us the way we ask regulators to judge you: by the evidence
We are a small, senior engineering team working to the standards European enforcement actually references: EN 301 549 and W3C’s WCAG-EM evaluation methodology.
Everything we produce is verifiable. Our work arrives as pull requests you review line by line, and a test log you can replay yourself. A conformance statement from us describes changes that exist in your git history. In an industry that mostly sells badges and PDFs, that makes us the least trust-dependent option available.
Reports available in English, Dutch, and German.
This site passes its own audit
Obviously it should. So we test it the same way we test yours, with automated checks plus keyboard and screen reader passes, and we publish the results.
Read our accessibility statement. Yes, we have one too. It would be weird if we didn’t.
Fair questions
Things skeptical engineers ask us
Can’t we just run Lighthouse ourselves?
You can, and you should. It is the same class of tooling we start with. Two catches. First, automated checks find roughly a third of WCAG 2.1 AA issues; they cannot tell whether a checkout can actually be completed with a screen reader, which is the thing regulators test. Second, a score fixes nothing. The gap between “we know” and “it’s merged” is the entire product.
Can we buy just the audit, without the fixes?
Yes, and plenty of teams do exactly that. The audit is a standalone service, and the report is written so your own developers can act on it: every finding comes with a code snippet you can apply directly. If you later decide you want us to implement after all, the audit work carries straight over into remediation; nothing gets done twice.
We already have an accessibility overlay. Are we covered?
Honestly: no. The European Disability Forum and IAAP have stated that overlays do not satisfy European legislation, the European Commission has not accepted them as a route to EN 301 549 conformance, and the US FTC fined the largest overlay vendor $1M over its compliance claims. An overlay also leaves your source code untouched, so every underlying failure is still there. We will happily audit a site with an overlay installed. The findings usually make the point for us.
Will this make us EAA compliant?
Careful. Nobody can certify you EAA compliant, because no such certification exists. The law works by self-declaration: you publish an accessibility statement under your own name. Our job is to make that statement true and defensible. We audit to the harmonized standard, fix what fails, and hand you the evidence log the statement rests on. Anyone promising a compliance guarantee is describing a product that cannot exist.
How do pull requests work if we’re on Shopify or another hosted platform?
Shopify themes live in git just fine. We work against your theme repository, or set one up, which you should have anyway. Same story for WooCommerce, custom React or Vue storefronts, Rails, and Laravel. Where a fix belongs in app configuration rather than code, it arrives as a documented, reviewable change request instead.
If there are no fines yet, why act now?
Three honest reasons. Enforcement escalates on the regulator’s schedule, not yours, and remediation under a court deadline costs multiples of remediation done calmly; ask Carrefour. Enterprise procurement already asks for conformance documentation today, so deals are lost while the legal risk is still theoretical. And the unfashionable one: about a quarter of your potential customers have a disability, and right now many of them cannot give you money.
What don’t you do?
We do not sell overlays, we do not guarantee regulatory outcomes, we do not pretend automated scans are a full audit, and we will not redesign your brand. If your site needs a ground-up rebuild rather than remediation, the free scan is where we tell you that, instead of invoicing you toward disappointment.
Find out what your shop sounds like.
The scan is free and the findings are yours either way. If everything passes, we say so and go away. Low-stakes offers are underrated.
Get your free scan