For online shops
Your shop clients are already in scope
The European Accessibility Act has applied to e-commerce across the EU since 28 June 2025. It is not about a marketing site being nice to use — it reaches the parts that take money: product pages, the cart, the checkout and every form in between. Rampsight scans those pages every week and hands you a report with your agency's name on it.
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Why a shop is squarely in scope
The European Accessibility Act covers consumer-facing services sold online, and an online shop is the textbook example. The obligation is not on the agency — it is on the trader whose site it is, which is your client.
The buying journey is the regulated part
A product page a screen reader user cannot understand, a size selector with no accessible name, a checkout field with no label: each of those is a person who cannot complete a purchase without help. That is precisely the barrier the Act is written about.
It applies now, not at some future deadline
The date was 28 June 2025. Member states enforce it themselves, through national market surveillance bodies, and they set their own penalties — Germany goes up to €100,000 under the BFSG. What the EAA requires.
A shop changes every week
New products, new campaign banners, a theme update, a checkout app installed. Any of those can add a failure to a page that passed last month, which is why a single audit is the wrong instrument for a shop.
The failures are boringly repetitive
A shop that gets alternative text wrong gets it wrong on every product in the feed. That is bad news for the score and good news for you: one fix in one template usually clears dozens of elements at once.
Nobody has told your client yet
Most small and mid-sized traders have never heard of the Act, or assume their platform handles it. The platform handles some of it. The theme, the apps and the content are yours to answer for.
You are the one who can fix it
The agency that built or maintains the shop is the only party who can actually change the template. A monitoring service that ends in remediation work is a natural extension of what you already sell.
What typically fails on a shop
These are the axe-core rules that come up again and again on e-commerce sites, with the severity the engine assigns them. You will recognise the rule ids from any report we generate.
| What breaks | Rule | Severity | Where you usually find it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Product images with no alternative text | image-alt | Critical | Category grids and product galleries, especially images imported in bulk from a supplier feed. |
| Form fields with no label | label | Critical | Checkout address forms, newsletter sign-ups and search boxes where a placeholder was used instead of a label. |
| Dropdowns with no accessible name | select-name | Critical | Size and colour pickers, quantity selectors, and country selects in the delivery step. |
| Text that does not meet the minimum contrast ratio | color-contrast | Serious | Sale prices, discount badges, placeholder text, disabled buttons and the small print in the footer. |
| Links and buttons with no discernible text | link-name | Serious | Icon-only links: cart, wishlist, social icons in the footer, and the close button on a promo bar. |
| Focusable content hidden from screen readers | aria-hidden-focus | Serious | Off-screen menu drawers, cookie banners and modal dialogs that are hidden with aria-hidden but still in the tab order. |
| Interactive controls nested inside each other | nested-interactive | Serious | Carousel slides and product cards where a whole card is a link and it contains an add-to-cart button. |
| Scrollable regions that the keyboard cannot reach | scrollable-region-focusable | Serious | Horizontal product carousels and scrolling size tables inside a modal. |
And what a scanner cannot settle for you
The last three rows are the honest edge of automated testing. A scanner can see that a drawer is marked aria-hidden while its links are still focusable, or that a carousel nests a button inside a link — genuine, common defects that lead to keyboard traps. What it cannot do is tab through your client’s checkout modal and tell you whether a keyboard user can get back out. That question needs a person, five minutes and a keyboard.
The same goes for meaning. We can tell you an image has no alt attribute. We cannot tell you that alt="IMG_4471" is useless, or that the alternative text on the size chart forgets to mention the sizes. Rampsight is a monitoring tool: it clears the machine-detectable layer every week so that the human review you or a specialist does is spent on the things only a human can judge. What the scanner checks, in full.
How the crawl sees a shop
Worth knowing before you promise a client full coverage of their checkout.
It starts at the home page
The crawler opens the shop's home page in a real Chromium and follows same-origin links breadth-first, up to your plan's budget — 300 pages per scan on Agency, 1000 on Scale. On a shop that means the home page, the category pages and a broad slice of product pages — the templates that repeat.
It does not have a shopping basket
The crawl is anonymous: it follows links, it does not add items to a cart or sign in. Pages that only exist once a basket has products, or behind a customer login, are not reached. Test those by hand — they are also the pages worth testing by hand.
A subdomain is its own site
Same origin only, so shop.example.com and www.example.com are two sites and count separately against your plan. A payment step hosted on the provider's own domain belongs to that provider, not to your client's origin.
Running it for a shop client
Three steps, and the first one costs nothing.
1
Scan the shop as it is today
Add the origin and let the first scan run. You get a grade, a count of violated rules and the templates they live in — usually within a couple of minutes.
2
Fix the templates, not the pages
The findings name the page, the CSS selector and the element. On a shop, most of them trace back to a handful of theme templates: the product card, the form field partial, the footer.
3
Publish the statement and keep scanning
Generate the accessibility statement, publish it at a link your client puts in their footer, and let the weekly scan tell you when the next theme update undoes something.
Questions that come up with shop clients
- The shop runs on a hosted platform. Is that not their problem?
Partly. The platform is responsible for its own core, but the theme, the installed apps and every piece of content are your client's. In practice most of what a scan finds on a shop sits in the theme and the product data, which is exactly the part the platform will not fix for them.
- Can you scan the checkout?
Only the parts an anonymous visitor can reach by following links. A checkout that requires a basket or a login is not crawled, so it needs manual testing. That is worth saying out loud to the client rather than discovering later — and it is a good reason for the retainer to include human review as well as monitoring.
- Will fixing everything you find make the shop compliant?
No, and we will not let a report say otherwise. Automated testing detects a real but partial share of the WCAG success criteria. Clearing every finding removes a large class of concrete barriers and is the sensible first move; judging conformance needs manual expert review on top.
- What about an accessibility overlay widget?
An overlay changes the page in the visitor’s browser without fixing the code underneath, and it is the thing complaints and lawsuits tend to point at. We do the opposite: find the real failures and give them to your developers. Why not an overlay.
Scan a shop this afternoon
Add one client shop, run the first scan and see the grade before you say a word to them. 14 days free, no credit card.