Service
Accessibility audit and remediation
What fails WCAG 2.2 AA on your site, why it matters, and what it costs to fix - written by someone who then fixes it.
Audit from £250
Why this is suddenly urgent
The European Accessibility Act has been in force since 28 June 2025, and it carries fines. Services that already existed before that date have until 28 June 2030, which sounds comfortable and is not, because the work is not a switch you flip.
Micro-enterprises - under 10 staff and under €2 million turnover - are exempt on services. Most businesses reading this are not, and the rule follows the market rather than your registered address: selling into the EU from outside it still counts.
The eight things that fail most often
- Colour contrast - light grey text on white is the most common failure on the web. AA needs 4.5:1 for normal text.
- Images with no alt text, and decorative images without an explicitly empty alt so a screen reader skips them.
- Forms with placeholders instead of real labels, and errors that only turn a border red.
- Nothing works without a mouse - custom dropdowns, sliders and modals are where this usually breaks.
- No visible focus indicator, because someone removed the default outline years ago for looking untidy.
- Video without captions - the one that costs real money, so it needs budgeting early.
- Headings chosen for their size rather than their level, which breaks the document outline.
- The cookie banner itself, which frequently cannot be dismissed by keyboard. Your GDPR banner failing your EAA obligation is a common combination.
What an audit from me actually contains
A prioritised list of what fails, what rule it fails, and what it costs to fix - ordered by severity and by how many pages each issue affects.
Not a 400-row tool export. Automated tools catch roughly a third of WCAG issues: they will tell you a button has no accessible name, but they cannot tell you the name makes no sense. The manual half is the part worth paying for - keyboard testing of your real journeys, and a screen reader run through checkout or booking.
The part nobody puts in the compliance articles
Every fix on that list also improves the site for people who are not disabled. Proper labels and heading structure are what search engines read. Contrast is what makes your site legible on a phone in daylight. Captions get watched by everyone on a train.
Roughly one in four adults in the EU has some form of disability. On an e-commerce site, a checkout that cannot be completed by keyboard is not a compliance problem - it is a checkout that has been quietly losing sales for years.
Questions people actually ask
- Does the European Accessibility Act apply to my business?
- If you have fewer than 10 employees and under €2 million turnover, services are exempt. Otherwise, if you sell online or provide banking, transport, telecom, e-books or ticketing, it applies - including if you sell into the EU from outside it. Send me your URL and I will tell you honestly whether you are exempt before quoting anything.
- What standard are you auditing against?
- EN 301 549, which in practice means WCAG 2.2 at Level AA. That is the bar the Act points at. The report names the specific success criterion each issue fails, so it stands up if anyone asks for evidence.
- Can I just run a tool myself first?
- Yes, and you should - it costs nothing. Run Lighthouse in Chrome DevTools on your three most important pages, then navigate those same pages using only the Tab key. That finds a real share of the problems and gives you a baseline before hiring anyone.
- Do you fix the issues or only report them?
- Both are available. The report is useful on its own and your own developer can work from it. If you want me to do the remediation, it is quoted from the report, itemised by issue.