That is a question that many companies should be asking themselves at the moment. Indeed, in one year (on June 28, 2025), the European Accessibility Act (EEA) will come into effect. The new legislation will oblige e-commerce companies and web shops to make their platform digitally accessible. Why this is such an important topic, which also offers opportunities, is discussed further in this article. But first, we're going to answer a question that may also be affecting you now, what exactly is digital accessibility?
Not everyone will be immediately clear what the term “digital accessibility” means exactly. In the broadest sense, it will mean that web shops for everyone accessible and easy to use, regardless of possible physical or mental limitations. The EEA states that digital platforms must comply with the four basic principles of Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG):
This may paint a complete picture for you. To make this just a little bit more concrete, we will explain two of these principles in more detail with an example.
The content of a webshop must therefore be visible and audible. An example of groups that should be taken into account is visitors who have a form of color blindness. In the Netherlands, approximately 1 in 12 men has a form of color blindness, which represents around 8% of the male population. In women, color blindness is much rarer; only 1 in 200 women, or 0.5%, has this condition. Color blindness comes in various forms, but what you should mainly take into account as a webshop is how the contrasts can differ among visitors with a form of color blindness. Below is an example of how the same image can be seen in different ways and how the image therefore has a different power.
An example of operability is navigating through a web shop with only a keyboard, i.e. without a mouse. People with a motor disability often navigate via the function tab on your keyboard, instead of using a mouse. You can use an attribute to indicate whether a link is part of the “tab order”. Make sure that the order of the visible links matches that in the HTML structure. If not, you can correct this by using tabindex attributes. To further help these people, it is important, for example, to visualize where someone is by tabbing by highlighting items (see outline in the example below). If you don't do this, it's for the visitor to guess where he or she is on the page at that moment.
We can imagine that this new legislation will raise a number of questions for you. We have listed a number of them and included an answer for convenience.
What kind of restrictions should I consider?
For what percent of my target group is this relevant?
Does this also apply to my webshop?
What are the consequences if I don't comply with the legislation?
In addition to preventing fines, are there other benefits to complying with these rules?
At Yellowgrape, we already try to take accessibility into account in our work as much as possible. We do this specifically in the CRO & Design team where accessibility is already really woven into the approach for our customers. Below are a few examples of how our designers, developers and CRO specialists include digital accessibility in their work.
Things where designers Attention should include color contrasts between text and background to increase readability. Furthermore, a design must be responsive to different devices and screen sizes. But clear typography and alt texts for images are also things that are considered.
Developers use semantic HTML tags<header>,, <nav><main>, and <footer>to clarify the structure of the page for help technologies. It is therefore also important that the code is arranged in such a way that a visitor can navigate with just the keyboard. Finally, ARIA attributes are also being considered to provide additional information to screen reader users.
CRO specialists look at optimizations and user-friendliness in general in various ways. Specifically focused on accessibility, there are a number of elements that need extra attention. This includes forms that should be easy to fill out with clear labels and descriptive error messages. This helps users with various disabilities fill out forms correctly. One method of finding out possible obstacles is to do user tests with people with different disabilities. This way, we can immediately see how they experience the website and what they may run into.
Ultimately, it is important that your webshop fully complies with the new regulations. To do this, it is advisable to have this audited and, based on that, make the website completely digitally accessible. We do these audits in collaboration with Level Level, a party that has a lot of experience with digital accessibility on websites in various sectors.
To begin with, you can of course try browsing your website yourself. Try navigating through your website with just your keyboard and seeing how far you get. Or take a look at your designs through the color blindness scan to see how your website can be seen through different eyes. This will help you get an even more sense of the subject.
Do you still have a question about this topic that is not covered in this article? Please contact us and we will be happy to update you.
