Web accessibility in 2026: obligations and testing tools

For years web accessibility was treated as a matter for public bodies and large companies. Since June 2025 that is no longer the case: with the European Accessibility Act, accessibility obligations also apply to many private businesses selling products and services online, eCommerce included. In 2026 the question is no longer whether to deal with it, but where to start without rebuilding the site from scratch.

What the European rules require

The European Accessibility Act is a European directive, transposed in Italy as well, that imposes accessibility requirements on a range of consumer-facing products and services, including e-commerce. Microenterprises providing services enjoy exemptions, but if your online store exceeds those size thresholds the requirement applies to you. The technical reference for the web remains WCAG, the international guidelines on content accessibility: four principles (perceivable, operable, understandable, robust) broken down into concrete criteria, with level AA as the reference target in the European context. You do not need to memorise them: you need to understand that accessibility is measured against verifiable criteria, not impressions.

The most frequent accessibility errors

On the sites we analyse before a rebuild, the same problems come up again and again:

• insufficient contrast between text and background, especially on buttons and grey text;
• images without alternative text, or with useless alt text like the file name;
• form fields without an associated label: the screen reader announces an empty field without saying what it is for;
• invisible keyboard focus, often removed via CSS for aesthetic reasons;
• information conveyed by colour alone, such as form errors signalled only by a red border;
• headings used for visual styling instead of the logical structure of the page.

The good news is that most of these defects can be fixed by working on CSS and markup, without upending the design.

Testing tools: where to start

For a first diagnosis, free tools are enough. Lighthouse, built into Chrome, includes a section dedicated to accessibility and gives you a score with a list of the problems detected. Extensions such as axe DevTools and WAVE analyse the page and point to the exact element to fix, with a reference to the WCAG criterion violated. A colour contrast check, available in dozens of online tools, rounds off the quick tests. Two warnings from experience on our projects: run the tests on the pages that matter (home, product page, checkout, contact form), not just the homepage; and remember that these tools only find the problems detectable automatically, which are a fraction of the total.

The manual test no tool can replace

Automated testing does not tell you whether a person can complete a purchase. For that you need three manual checks anyone can do. First: navigate the site using only the keyboard, with Tab and Enter; if you cannot tell where you are or get stuck in a menu, the problem is real. Second: try a screen reader, VoiceOver on Mac and iPhone or NVDA on Windows, and listen to your product page; you will understand in a minute what badly done markup means. Third: zoom the page to 200 percent and check that text and features remain usable. We advise our clients to repeat these checks after every major change to the site, because accessibility degrades with every release if nobody keeps an eye on it.

Worth it even beyond the obligations

An accessible site is almost always a better site for everyone: clean markup that search engines read better, clearer forms that reduce input errors, contrast that stays readable in the sun on a smartphone. People with disabilities are a significant slice of the audience that today, on many eCommerce sites, simply cannot buy. Treating accessibility as an investment in usability and conversions, rather than a box to tick, is the healthiest way to approach it in 2026.

Bring your site into compliance starting from the foundations

Fixing accessibility on a badly built site costs more than doing it right from the start: that is why in our websites and eCommerce service we treat semantic markup, contrast and keyboard navigation as baseline requirements, not extras. If you want to know where your site stands against the European obligations, let's talk in a free call: we analyse your main pages and tell you what to fix first.