The European Accessibility Act has been enforceable since 28 June 2025. It applies to ecommerce services offered to consumers in the EU, including stores based outside the EU that sell into it. The Act itself does not list technical rules; it points at harmonised standard EN 301 549, which in turn adopts WCAG 2.1 level AA for web content.
That makes WCAG 2.1 AA the practical test. This scan runs axe-core against those success criteria on your live storefront.
Fines are set nationally and differ substantially by member state — from €60,000 in Ireland to €500,000 in Germany, with Italy expressing the ceiling as a share of turnover. See the per-country pages for the figure that applies to you.
What this scan checks first
These are the rules that appear most often in filed accessibility complaints. Each links to the fix for Shopify.
- Images missing alternative text — 1.1.1 Non-text Content (Level A)
- Links with no discernible text — 2.4.4 Link Purpose (In Context) (Level A)
- Buttons with no accessible name — 4.1.2 Name, Role, Value (Level A)
- Text colour does not contrast enough with its background — 1.4.3 Contrast (Minimum) (Level AA)
- Form inputs with no label — 1.3.1 Info and Relationships (Level A)
- No way to skip repeated navigation — 2.4.1 Bypass Blocks (Level A)
What automated testing cannot tell you
A scan decides what is decidable from the markup. It can prove an image has no alt attribute. It cannot tell you whether the alt text you wrote actually describes the photograph. It can measure contrast; it cannot judge whether your error messages make sense to someone using a screen reader under time pressure.
We say so on every report rather than at the bottom of a terms page, because the opposite claim is what earned a competitor a $1,000,000 FTC order in January 2025.