Say "accessible website" and most people picture something vaguely charitable. It's more concrete than that: there are people who can't buy on your site today, even though they'd like to.
Not because the site is bad. Because nobody considered them when it was designed.
Four situations that happen right now
Someone navigating by keyboard only. Their hand might shake, their wrist might be injured, or it's simply faster for them. They tab through the page — and nothing shows where they are. Focus indication is switched off because the designer thought it looked ugly.
Someone using a screen reader. The machine reads the page aloud. It reaches a product image and hears: "image." Then again: "image." No idea what they're looking at.
Someone with low vision. The button text is light grey on lighter grey. Enough contrast for a twenty-year-old to read in good light — not enough for a sixty-year-old to read in the evening.
Someone on a phone, on a bus, one-handed. The "Add to cart" button is twenty pixels tall. Three tries to hit it, two misses, then they close the site.
In none of these cases is the problem that the site is ugly. The problem is that they can't pay.
This affects far more people than you'd think
When people hear "accessibility," they picture a narrow group. Most measures actually reach a wide one:
- Older users with declining eyesight
- Someone typing one-handed with a broken wrist
- Someone checking their phone in bright sunlight
- Someone on a slow connection
- Someone in a hurry
And there's a side effect few people mention: the same fixes also help search visibility. Semantic structure, image descriptions, a clean heading hierarchy — Google reads a page the same way a screen reader does. One piece of work, two outcomes.
What changed in 2025
The European Accessibility Act has extended to consumer-facing online services since June 2025 — including online stores.
Exactly who it covers and what exemptions apply is a legal question, and a lawyer answers that.
What we see from the market: most Hungarian and Central European SME stores don't meet the technical requirements — and most don't know the topic exists.
Same situation as GDPR before 2018. Whoever moved early got ahead. Whoever waited until it was urgent scrambled, and paid more.
What an assessment typically finds
Run an assessment on a typical SME site, and these are the usual findings:
Contrast. On buttons, secondary text, footer links. Looked fine in the design file; unreadable in reality.
Missing image descriptions. A store often has hundreds of images with no alt text. That alone makes the whole catalogue unusable with a screen reader.
Focus. Keyboard navigation doesn't show where the user is. Often switched off on purpose because "it's not pretty."
Forms. No real label on the field, just faint placeholder text — which disappears the moment you start typing.
Tap target size. The recommended minimum is 44×44 pixels. In practice it's often half that.
Worth understanding here
Automated checkers only catch a fraction of this.
There are plenty of free tools that run a scan and hand you a list. Useful — but most of the real problems are things a machine can't judge.
An image description can exist and still be useless ("img_123.jpg"). A form can be technically valid and still untrackable with a keyboard. A page can pass every automated test while a screen reader user still can't do anything with it.
That's why we go through it by hand too — with a keyboard, with a screen reader, the way a real user would. Slower, and not very photogenic. But it's the only way to find out what's actually going on.
How much work fixing it is
Most items are surprisingly small.
Contrast is a colour-value change. The focus indicator is a few lines of CSS. Enlarging a tap target, likewise. Together, these are often done in a single day.
Image descriptions are the most labour-intensive part, because they're written one at a time — but that's a matter of time, not complexity.
What's genuinely a lot of work: if the site's structure is fundamentally broken. If everything's a <div>, if there's no heading hierarchy, if the forms are hand-rolled buttons pretending to be inputs. At that point the fix is closer to a rebuild — and it's usually worth just doing that.
The assessment is what decides this, before anyone spends money in the wrong direction.
Why us
We don't just assess — we fix it too.
That matters, because most accessibility reports leave the client with nothing they can act on: a seventy-page PDF full of jargon, and then the search for someone who can implement it. The developer who does the fix then has to re-learn the whole thing from scratch.
For us, the assessment and the fix are the same hands. Whoever found the problem also knows how to solve it.
What we don't do: we don't state whether a site is legally compliant. That's a legal determination, not a supplier's opinion. We remove the technical barriers, and at the end you get it in writing — what changed.
If you're curious where you stand today, request an assessment. You get the list either way, even if you don't continue with us.
More on the service: Accessibility.