Since 28 June 2025, the European Accessibility Act has applied to most consumer-facing e-commerce in the EU. Many shops have responded by commissioning an audit. Many of those audits are now a spreadsheet with a few hundred rows that nobody has time to work through.
We’ve run audits that ended differently, most notably on Martinus, Slovakia’s largest bookseller. Here’s the approach.
Audit journeys, not pages
Automated scanners are useful, but they catch only part of the real issues and say nothing about whether someone can actually buy a book. We start from the journeys that matter to the business: find a product, choose a variant, add it to the basket, check out, manage an order.
Each journey is walked with a keyboard only, with a screen reader (VoiceOver and NVDA), at 200% and 400% zoom, and with reduced motion enabled. That catches the issues that block people, not just the ones a tool can detect.
Group findings by component
A finding like “the quantity selector on the product page has no accessible name” is usually not a page problem. It’s a component problem that shows up on twenty pages.
So we map every finding to the component that causes it. A long list of page-level issues collapses into a much shorter list of component fixes, and each fix improves every page at once. This is where a design system pays for itself.
Fix in order of who it blocks
We prioritise by impact on completing a journey:
- Blockers. Things that stop someone completing a purchase: keyboard traps, unlabelled form fields, focus lost in modals.
- Serious friction. Things that make it much harder: poor contrast on key actions, missing error messages, carousels that can’t be paused.
- Everything else. Valid issues that cause annoyance rather than abandonment.
Make it stick
The audit’s real deliverable isn’t the report. It’s the set of habits that stop issues from coming back:
- Accessible components in the design system, with their requirements documented next to them.
- A short review checklist for every pull request: keyboard, focus, names, contrast.
- Automated checks in CI for the issues tools can catch, so people can spend their attention on the ones they can’t.
- A named owner for accessibility in the product team.
The payoff
Accessibility work tends to improve things for everyone. Clearer labels, visible focus, better error messages and faster pages help every customer, and they’re the same changes that improve conversion.
If you’re facing an audit report or the EAA, we can help you turn it into shipped fixes.