Frequently asked questions

If you sell to consumers and you are not a micro-enterprise: yes. Since 28 June 2025 the European Accessibility Act, as implemented in national law, has required accessibility for services in electronic commerce, measured against the standard EN 301 549.

Exempt are micro-enterprises with fewer than 10 employees and no more than €2m annual turnover, as well as offerings aimed exclusively at business customers.

The exemption is for micro-enterprises. It only applies if both conditions are met: fewer than 10 employees and no more than €2m in annual turnover or balance sheet total.

National small-business schemes for VAT have nothing to do with this threshold. And the exemption only covers services — anyone placing products covered by the act on the market is obliged regardless of size.

Yes. There is no grandfathering for services; the requirements have applied to existing sites since 28 June 2025. The transitional rules mainly concern self-service terminals and contracts already running, not your shop.

Market surveillance authorities can order measures; in Germany fines of up to €100,000 are possible, and in extreme cases the service can be prohibited.

In practice the second route is more common: warning letters from competitors and from associations entitled to sue. Since the third quarter of 2026 authorities have also been scanning automatically — so you can be flagged without anyone complaining.

EN 301 549 is the European standard for the accessibility of ICT products and services. For web content it refers to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1, conformance level AA.

In practice that means the benchmark is the WCAG 2.1 AA success criteria. The standard is published — anyone can look up what is being tested. That is what separates a test from a claim.

No. The German market surveillance bodies consider overlay tools unsuitable for meeting the legal requirements, and the German Federation of the Blind and Partially Sighted warns about these vendors’ advertising claims.

An overlay changes the page after the fact in the browser instead of fixing the cause in the source. An installed overlay is now widely read as an indication that the requirements are not met.

No. No shop platform ships accessibility with it. At best the platforms provide a usable foundation; whether your site meets the criteria is decided by the theme, the extensions and your content.

Typical findings are unlabelled icon buttons, insufficient contrast in accent colours, form fields without an associated label and images without alternative text — all things that only arise in the specific installation.

The home page returns a number within seconds. A full pass across the important page types — category, product detail, basket, contact, legal notice, privacy policy, terms — takes 20 to 30 seconds in our measurements.

No, and we do not claim it can. The common estimate is that roughly one third of the WCAG criteria are automatically testable.

Not automatically testable are, for example, whether alternative text is factually correct, whether the checkout is operable by keyboard, whether focus is visible, the reading order and the comprehensibility of error messages. We report automated findings and items for manual review separately.

It does not. An automated click on “Accept” would be a declaration of intent in someone else’s name. Instead the scanner detects whether a banner obscures content or removes parts of the page from the tested area, and records that in the report.

The consequence: the reported number of issues is more likely too low than too high. We consider that the more honest direction.

The scan and the issue count are free. The Watch service starts at €19 per month, the All-round offer including remediation at €99 per month, tiered by annual turnover. All prices are published on the pricing page — no sales call required.

A publicly available statement of how your offering meets the requirements, which parts may not be accessible and how users can report barriers. It is one of the mandatory items and is a documentation question, not a code question.

We keep it current as part of the subscription, because otherwise it is out of date with the first change to your site.

It shows that your website is tested regularly against EN 301 549, carries the test date and links to the public test report. It explicitly does not say “certified accessible”.

You may display it as long as testing continues. That is not a contractual trick but the condition under which a quality mark is permissible: without recurring checks it becomes misleading.

No. The European Accessibility Act applies in all 27 member states, and the technical benchmark EN 301 549 is the same everywhere. What differs are the national implementing acts, the competent authorities and the penalty ranges.

So if you sell into several EU countries, you test once technically and handle the national formalities separately.