What changed, and for whom
The European directive on accessibility requirements for products and services, known as the European Accessibility Act, has applied since 28 June 2025. It does not target every website, contrary to what is often written.
Covered, in essence: e-commerce, consumer banking services, passenger transport, e-books and electronic communications services. An exemption exists for micro-enterprises providing services, defined as employing fewer than ten people and with an annual turnover of at most two million euros.
In France an older obligation applies on top, from the 2005 act, targeting public bodies and companies whose French turnover exceeds 250 million euros, with a requirement to publish an accessibility statement and a compliance level against the national framework.
In other words: a small business with a brochure site is generally out of scope. A small business selling online may be in it. If you are unsure about your situation, that is a question for your legal adviser, not for an audit tool.
Why it concerns you even if you are exempt
Because an indexing bot and a screen reader read a page the same way. Neither of them sees. Both follow the document structure, the heading hierarchy, the alternative text on images and the declared language.
Direct consequence: most accessibility fixes are also SEO fixes. An image with no alternative text is invisible to a blind person and unreadable to Google Images. A form whose fields are not labelled is incomprehensible to a screen reader and to an AI assistant trying to contact you.
And there remains the commercial argument, rarely mentioned: a non-negligible share of your visitors has a visual, motor or cognitive difficulty, permanent or temporary. A site that is unreadable on these points loses customers without a single one ever telling you.
The six fixes that cover the essentials
1. Alternative text on images. Every image carrying information needs a short description. A purely decorative image, on the contrary, should carry an empty attribute, so the screen reader ignores it instead of announcing a file name.
2. The declared language. One line in the document header. Without it, a screen reader pronounces French text with English phonetics, and the engine hesitates about the target market.
3. The heading hierarchy. One main heading, then levels that descend without skipping a step. That is what allows navigating a page heading by heading instead of listening to everything. It is exactly what SEO measures too.
4. Form labels. Every field must have a linked label. Example text inside the field does not replace a label: it disappears as soon as you start typing.
5. Text contrast. Light grey on white is fashionable and unreadable in bright sunlight, on a worn screen, or for anyone over sixty. The reference threshold is a contrast ratio of 4.5 to 1 on body text.
6. Keyboard navigation. Every function must be reachable without a mouse, and the cursor position must stay visible. A site that hides the focus indicator because it is judged unsightly becomes unusable for anyone navigating by keyboard.
What our audit measures, and what it does not replace
We measure seven automatable points, the ones readable directly in the page code: presence and relevance of alternative texts, declared language, heading hierarchy, field labelling, and a few others.
It needs saying plainly what an automated audit cannot do. It cannot judge whether your alternative text describes the image well, nor whether your checkout flow is usable by a partially sighted person, nor whether your video is correctly captioned. Accessibility frameworks contain a majority of criteria that require a human test. A tool tells you where to look, it does not deliver compliance.
If you are legally covered, an automated audit is a starting point, never proof of compliance. If you are not, these seven points are worth the fifteen minutes they cost, if only for SEO.
For the rest, the article on cookies covers the other side of compliance.