The European Accessibility Act reached online shops: what fails in practice

The European Accessibility Act came into force on 28 June 2025, through Diretiva (UE) 2019/882, the European directive every member state had to transpose into national law. In Portugal it became Decreto-Lei n.º 82/2022, the Portuguese decree-law that carries it. A year has passed. Most Portuguese e-commerce sites still fail on the same points, and almost every article on the subject is written by people who sell audits, not by people who build the sites and the shops.

We build websites and online shops. This article shows what fails in real code, in what order it gets corrected, and what that costs in work.

What the law requires

Decreto-Lei n.º 82/2022 requires a set of products and services to meet accessibility requirements, meaning they can be used by people with visual, motor, hearing or cognitive impairments. E-commerce is named in artigo 2.º, article 2, alongside banking, transport, communications and digital books. The obligation has produced effects since 28 June 2025, and service contracts signed before that date may stay in place until 28 June 2030 at the latest.

For an online shop, the Directive sets out three obligations: to inform users about the accessibility of the products and services on sale, to make the identification, security and payment functions accessible, and to provide identification, electronic signature and payment methods that are perceivable and operable. This is not a recommendation of good practice, it is the checkout.

The concrete requirements sit in Portaria n.º 220/2023, de 20 de julho, the Portuguese ministerial order of 20 July 2023, which defines them and also fixes the criteria for claiming disproportionate burden. The technical standard used as the reference across Europe is EN 301 549, which adopts WCAG 2.1 level AA. WCAG, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, are the international set of criteria that defines what makes a page usable by the general public.

The obligation almost nobody meets

There is a requirement in artigo 13.º, article 13, that goes unnoticed and is the easiest of all to verify from the outside. Anyone providing a covered service has to explain, in writing and in an accessible format, how that service meets the accessibility requirements. Annex II of the decree-law requires that information to sit in the general terms and conditions, or in an equivalent document, and to stay there for as long as the service exists.

In practice this means an accessibility statement published on the site. Go through the online shops you know and count how many have one. It is the first thing an inspector or a complainant finds, because confirming that it is missing does not require opening the code.

Who is covered

Here is the confusion worth clearing up. Microenterprises that provide services are exempt from the accessibility requirements for services, under n.º 5 do artigo 2.º, paragraph 5 of article 2. A microenterprise, in the Directive's definition, is a company that employs fewer than ten people and whose annual turnover, or annual balance sheet total, does not exceed 2 million euros.

This means a good share of Portuguese online shops carry no direct legal obligation. It does not mean the subject fails to concern them, for three reasons.

The first is that the exemption follows the company, not the website. A company that goes from nine to eleven people stops being exempt without anyone in the business noticing.

The second is that the exemption covers services, not products. Anyone who manufactures or distributes products with a digital component remains covered.

The third is commercial. The preamble of the decree-law itself estimates that around 87 million people in the European Union have a disability, and notes that the Portuguese population is ageing. A checkout form that does not work with a keyboard excludes buyers every day, law or no law.

Who enforces it, and what failing costs

This is the point where most Portuguese articles get it wrong, including our own first draft. Enforcement for e-commerce does not sit with ASAE, the Portuguese food safety and economic authority. Artigo 28.º, article 28, assigns it to ANACOM, the Portuguese communications authority. ASAE keeps a part of the products, and the Instituto dos Direitos das Pessoas com Deficiência, the Portuguese institute for the rights of people with disabilities, follows and monitors how the regime is applied.

Providing a service that does not meet the requirements is a contraordenação muito grave, a very serious administrative offence. For a company, the fine runs from 24,000 euros up to the maximum of the general administrative offence regime. There is one further consequence that usually weighs more than the amount: on conviction, the decision is published, at the offender's expense, in two national newspapers.

A consumer can file a complaint directly, alone or through an association of people with disabilities. In Portugal we still know of no public enforcement case, which is different from saying there will not be one.

What fails in practice

The data is consistent and unflattering. The 2026 WebAIM Million report, which automatically analyses one million pages, found conformance failures on 95.9% of them, up from 94.8% in 2025, with an average of 56.1 errors per page. A European study that re-tested 88 sites one year after the law came into force, run by a company that sells accessibility scanners, found 93% failing at least one automated level AA check.

Six failures account for around 96% of all errors detected, and they have been the same for seven years.

Two readings of this data matter to anyone running a shop. The first is that e-commerce is worse than the average: pages in the shopping category carry 71 errors per page, 26.6% above the general average, and only sports is worse. By platform, Shopify sits 33.9% above the average, Magento 35%, and Prestashop 155.3%. The second is that pages in Portuguese carry 61.1 errors per page, 8.8% above the average, while pages in English sit 18% below.

The pattern says a lot. None of these failures is a hard engineering problem. They are omissions of detail that pile up because nobody checks for them, and almost all of them are corrected at project level, not page by page.

There are two failures that automated tools do not catch and that, in our experience, are the most expensive to resolve once the site is built.

The first is keyboard navigation. Many category menus, sidebar filters and cart panels respond only to a mouse. Anyone navigating with a keyboard gets stuck, or never reaches the next step. This has to be thought through when the component is built.

The second is visible focus, the outline that shows where the user is on the page. It is frequently removed for aesthetic reasons, in a single line of CSS, and without it keyboard navigation becomes impossible to follow.

Why it is getting worse

The conclusion of the 2026 report deserves to be read by anyone who decides how their site gets built. Errors rose 10.1% in one year and pages became 22.5% more complex. WebAIM attributes the reversal to reliance on third party libraries and to coding practices assisted by artificial intelligence. Pages that use ARIA, a set of attributes created precisely to improve accessibility, averaged 17 more errors than pages that do not use it.

Writing more code, faster, with more layers, did not produce more accessible sites. It produced the opposite.

Overlays do not solve it

This is worth saying plainly, because it is the answer the market sells hardest. Accessibility overlays, those widgets with a small human icon that open a panel with contrast and text size options, do not make a site conformant. They lay a layer over the problem without correcting the code underneath, and in several cases they interfere with the screen readers users already have installed.

This is not an isolated opinion. In April 2025, the United States Federal Trade Commission approved a final order requiring accessiBe to pay one million dollars, over deceptive advertising about its product's ability to make sites conformant and over fabricated customer reviews. According to UsableNet's 2024 report, 25% of digital accessibility lawsuits targeted sites that used overlays, with the overlay cited as a barrier rather than a solution.

An overlay gives comfort to whoever buys it. It does not give access to whoever needs it.

Where to start: critical journeys first

No site is literally 100% conformant, and chasing that number is the fastest way to never start. The approach we argue for is a different one: protect the journeys that generate revenue and legal obligation first, then widen out.

In an online shop, the order is this.

1. Search and product listing. Filters operable with a keyboard, results announced to screen readers.
2. Product page. Real alternative text on the images, an accessible variant selector, a purchase button with a clear name.
3. Cart and checkout. Labels on every field, validation errors explained in text next to the field, correct tab order.
4. Confirmation and account. Success and error messages that are perceivable without relying on colour.
5. A published accessibility statement. It is a legal obligation and it is the cheapest item on the list.
6. The rest of the site. Institutional pages, blog, policies.

A test any business owner can run alone in five to six minutes: open your shop, let go of the mouse, and try to buy a product using only Tab, Enter and the arrow keys on your keyboard. If at any step you stop being able to tell where you are, you have found the most serious problem on your site.

What this costs in work

It depends on two things: how much of the site is your own code, and how early the problem is caught.

In a shop built to measure, the six common failures are resolved mostly in the shared components, which means one correction that propagates to every page. In a bought theme, or in a shop with many plugins, the correction is slower, because the code that creates the problem is not yours and cannot always be changed without losing plugin updates. The WebAIM numbers by platform show exactly that.

The real difference in cost is in the timing. Building an accessible component from the start adds little to the budget. Going back to a two hundred page site two years later to correct forms and contrast is a project of its own, with an audit, a correction and a retest.

In June 2026 we ran the complete redesign of the Pieces of History site, a real estate and short term rental group. Accessibility was not a separate phase, it entered the construction decisions: alternative text on every image, contrast ratios verified across the whole site, and every interactive element with a name, no empty links and no empty buttons. The result scored above 95 in performance, accessibility, best practices and SEO, measured on that same project. There was no correction budget because there was nothing to correct.

Where we stand

The European Accessibility Act has been treated as a legal problem, and it is above all a construction problem. A lawyer tells you whether you are covered. A lawyer does not correct your implementation.

Our position is this: accessibility is not something you add, it is a consequence of building well. Sufficient contrast, fields with names, buttons with text and keyboard navigation are decisions taken at the start of a project, and they cost almost nothing at that point. Left until after the site is live, they turn into a correction budget.

If you have an online shop and do not know where you stand, start with the keyboard test described above. It is free, it takes five to six minutes, and it tells you more about the state of your site than any automated report.

Get in touch.

Sources

• Decreto-Lei n.º 82/2022, de 6 de dezembro, texto consolidado, consolidated text, Procuradoria-Geral Distrital de Lisboa
• Decreto-Lei n.º 82/2022, official publication in PDF, Diário da República
• Portaria n.º 220/2023, de 20 de julho, Diário da República
• Diretiva (UE) 2019/882, Portuguese version, EUR-Lex
• EN 301 549, published versions, ETSI
• Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1, W3C
• The WebAIM Million, 2026 report, WebAIM
• One year after the EAA, re-testing 100 EU websites, WebYes
• FTC approves final order requiring accessiBe to pay 1 million dollars, Federal Trade Commission
• Accessibility overlay widgets attract lawsuits, Accessibility.Works, with data from the UsableNet 2024 report
• Instituto dos Direitos das Pessoas com Deficiência
• ANACOM