Web accessibility means making your site usable by everyone, including people who navigate with a screen reader, a keyboard alone, or a heavily magnified display. Since June 28, 2025, the European Accessibility Act imposes concrete obligations on many private companies across Europe. If you have a professional website, you need to know what the law expects, how to check whether your site complies, and where to start if it doesn’t.
What exactly is web accessibility?
Web accessibility is the practice of building a website so that a person with a disability can browse it, understand it, and interact with it without barriers. This includes visual impairments like blindness, low vision, and color blindness, hearing impairments, motor disabilities that prevent using a mouse, and cognitive difficulties that make dense or poorly structured content hard to follow.
It’s tempting to think this only concerns a small fraction of your visitors, but the numbers tell a different story. In Europe, roughly 87 million people live with some form of disability, and that figure doesn’t account for temporary situations like a broken arm, forgotten glasses, or eye strain at the end of a long day. Someone checking your site outdoors on their phone, with sunlight washing out the screen and reducing contrast, benefits from exactly the same improvements as someone with low vision. Accessibility isn’t a special accommodation for a few, it’s a quality of craftsmanship that serves all your visitors.
In practice, an accessible site rests on four core principles. Content must be perceivable, meaning every image carries descriptive text, every video offers captions, and color contrast is strong enough to read comfortably. The site must be operable, meaning all functions, menus, forms, and buttons work with a keyboard and don’t require a mouse. Content must be understandable, with clear language, explicit error messages, and predictable navigation. And the code must be robust enough that assistive technologies like screen readers can interpret every element on the page correctly.
These four principles aren’t abstract ideals invented by standards committees. They’re the foundation of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, commonly known as WCAG, which is the international reference standard that most national laws either adopt directly or base their own regulations on. In France, the national framework is called the RGAA, which maps closely to WCAG. In practice, if your site meets WCAG at level AA, it meets most legal requirements in Europe.
Which businesses are required to make their site accessible?
In France, three layers of regulation overlap, and it’s easy to get confused. The first is the law of February 11, 2005, which requires accessibility for all public sector websites and private companies entrusted with a public service mission. The second extends this same law to private companies with annual revenue exceeding 250 million euros, calculated as an average of the three preceding years.
The third and most recent layer is the European Accessibility Act, transposed into French law on March 9, 2023, and enforceable since June 28, 2025. This directive covers entire sectors regardless of company size: e-commerce, banking, telecommunications, transport, audiovisual services, and digital book publishing. If you sell products or services online, you’re very likely affected.
There’s an exception for the smallest businesses. Companies with fewer than ten employees and annual revenue below two million euros are exempt. Both conditions must be met simultaneously, having a small team isn’t enough if your revenue exceeds the threshold.
For businesses in Switzerland, the situation differs. The Federal Act on the Elimination of Discrimination against People with Disabilities applies mainly to public services and transport companies. The Swiss private sector doesn’t yet face legal obligations comparable to the European directive. However, if your Swiss company sells online to customers in the European Union, the directive applies to your digital services targeting that market. And beyond the law, an accessible site remains a competitive advantage that broadens your audience and signals professionalism to every visitor.
What penalties do you face for a non-accessible site?
The penalties aren’t symbolic. For public organizations, the fine can reach 50,000 euros per non-compliant digital service, and it’s renewable every six months as long as the issue persists. For private companies subject to the European directive, the amounts are cumulative: a 7,500 euro contravention, doubled to 15,000 for repeat offenses, with a possible daily penalty of 3,000 euros capped at 300,000 euros, and a fine of up to 75,000 euros.
In practice, enforcement is still rare for small businesses, and initial actions by regulators have focused on large e-commerce platforms and high-profile public services. But the trend is clearly toward stricter enforcement. The risk isn’t only financial: a non-accessible site also exposes you to individual complaints and, more importantly, to reputational damage that’s hard to repair when a user publicizes their inability to access your services.
Affected businesses must also publish an accessibility statement on their site, explaining their level of compliance, identifying parts of the site that aren’t yet accessible, and providing a way to contact a responsible person when difficulties arise. The absence of this statement is itself a sanctionable violation, and it’s also the first thing an auditor will look for on your site.
The European directive also includes a transitional period for certain services. Existing e-commerce sites that were already live before the directive took effect have until June 28, 2030 to achieve full compliance, while new services launched after the enforcement date must be accessible from day one. This grace period doesn’t mean you can ignore the issue for five years, it means you have time to plan a structured approach rather than scrambling, but the clock is running and demonstrating good-faith progress matters if questions arise.
How can you test your site’s accessibility for free?
You don’t need to hire an auditor to get a first diagnosis. Three free checks you can run yourself in under an hour will reveal most common issues.
The first is the Lighthouse audit built into Chrome. Open your site in Chrome, right-click, select “Inspect”, then click the “Lighthouse” tab and run an audit with the “Accessibility” category checked. The score you get, out of 100, gives you an overview, and the report details every detected issue with an explanation and a link to the recommended fix. A score above 90 indicates a solid baseline, but a perfect score doesn’t guarantee full compliance, since some criteria can only be verified by a human.
The second is the WAVE extension, available free for Chrome and Firefox. Once installed, a single click on the WAVE icon analyzes the current page and displays errors right where they occur. Images without alt text, insufficient contrast, unlabeled forms, and empty links appear immediately with colored icons. It’s often the most revealing check because you see problems in their actual context.
The third is the keyboard test. Put your mouse aside and navigate your site using only the Tab key to move between interactive elements, Enter to activate a link or button, and Escape to close a menu or dialog. If at any point you can’t tell where the focus is, if you get trapped in a menu you can’t exit, or if a button doesn’t respond to the keyboard, that’s an accessibility barrier your visitors face too when using assistive technology.
A fourth tool worth mentioning for those with some technical comfort is the axe DevTools extension, also free, which installs in Chrome and analyzes your page against the international WCAG standard. Its report sorts issues by severity and pinpoints exactly which code element is responsible, making corrections easier for a developer.
These checks cover roughly 30 to 40 of the criteria defined in standards like WCAG and France’s RGAA framework, which contains 106 criteria across 13 categories. For full compliance, a professional audit remains necessary, but starting with these free tests gives you a clear picture of where you stand and which fixes to tackle first. And if your Lighthouse score already exceeds 90, you’re likely ahead of the majority of sites, where the average compliance level among major companies hovers around 75%.
Which fixes should you prioritize?
If your tests revealed issues, some corrections have far more impact than others. Here are five that resolve the greatest number of barriers with the least effort.
The first is adding alt text to every meaningful image on your site. This text, invisible on screen but read aloud by screen readers, should describe what the image shows or contributes to the content, not simply repeat the file name. A photo of your team at work deserves text like “three team members reviewing a prototype on screen”, not “team-photo-2024.jpg”. Purely decorative images, like a divider or background texture, should have empty alt text so screen readers skip them entirely.
The second is checking your heading hierarchy. Each page should contain only one level-1 heading, which is typically the main page title. Subsequent sections use level-2 headings, subsections use level-3, and so on without skipping levels. A screen reader uses this structure as a table of contents, letting users jump directly to the section they need, and an inconsistent hierarchy makes that navigation impossible. If your site is built on a platform like WordPress, verify that your headings are actual heading elements in the code and not just bold text styled to look larger.
The third is ensuring sufficient contrast between text and background. Standards require a contrast ratio of at least 4.5 to 1 for normal text and at least 3 to 1 for large headings. A free tool like WebAIM’s contrast checker lets you enter your text and background colors and see immediately whether the ratio passes. Light gray text on a white background, common in showcase website designs, is often the first contrast issue to fix.
The fourth is making your site fully operable by keyboard. Every link, button, form field, and dropdown menu must be reachable with Tab and activatable with Enter. The focus indicator, that visible outline showing which element is selected, must never be hidden by your stylesheet. If your designer removed the focus outline for aesthetic reasons, restoring it is a priority fix.
The fifth is labeling your forms properly. Each input field must be associated with a visible label that states what should be entered. Placeholder text inside the field, which disappears the moment a user starts typing, doesn’t replace a real label. Error messages must identify exactly which field has a problem and explain how to correct it.
Why does accessibility also improve your search rankings?
Search engines and people with disabilities share a surprising trait: neither sees your site the way you do. Google doesn’t look at your images, it reads your alt text. Google doesn’t visually distinguish your sections, it analyzes your heading hierarchy. And Google doesn’t click your menus, it follows your link structure.
That’s why every accessibility fix you make simultaneously strengthens your Google rankings. Alt text on your images lets Google Images index them properly and display your site in image search results, a traffic channel many businesses underestimate. A clean heading hierarchy helps Google understand your content structure and extract the most relevant passages for rich results. Sufficient contrast and a fast site contribute to strong user experience signals, which Google measures through its Core Web Vitals.
The connection works in reverse too. If you’ve already invested in SEO by following good practices, like writing a solid website design brief or ensuring your legal notices are complete, some of the accessibility work is probably already done. A site well-built for SEO is rarely far from accessibility standards, and the remaining corrections are often minor.
Should you rebuild your site to make it accessible?
The short answer: rarely. In the vast majority of cases, the most effective corrections can be made on your existing site without rebuilding anything. Adding alt text, fixing contrast, restoring heading hierarchy, adding form labels, and bringing back keyboard focus indicators are interventions that happen page by page, often in just a few hours of technical work.
A full website redesign is only justified in two specific situations. The first is when your site’s technical structure makes corrections impossible or prohibitively expensive, for instance if it relies on outdated technology that generates code incompatible with screen readers and every page would need to be rewritten manually. The second is when your site simultaneously has accessibility, performance, SEO, and design issues that, taken together, justify starting fresh on solid foundations.
If you’re planning to create a new website, the ideal moment to integrate accessibility is the very beginning of the project. A site designed for accessibility from the start doesn’t cost significantly more than one that ignores it, because best practices like alt text, sufficient contrast, and keyboard navigation are part of the normal work of a competent developer. On the other hand, retrofitting accessibility onto a site that was built without it requires catch-up effort that can represent a significant budget.
The question isn’t whether to invest in accessibility but rather when and how to do it most effectively. If your site is recent and well-built, a few targeted corrections will probably suffice. If your site is several years old and has accumulated technical debt, a redesign can be the opportunity to address everything at once. In every case, start with the free tests described above, identify the priority fixes, and tackle them in order of their impact on your visitors. Accessibility isn’t a project you finish one day, it’s a quality standard you integrate into every update to your site, just as you maintain security or loading speed.
