Online shop accessibility: inspections, risks and enforcement
The European Accessibility Act has applied since 28 June 2025 and is transposed in Slovakia by Act No. 351/2022 Coll. Its scope, the competent market surveillance authority and any penalties depend on the product, service and circumstances of the case. The following overview provides general guidance, not legal advice.
A common problem: the business has no accurate evidence of its current state
A customer complaint can be one reason for an assessment, but it is not the only route through which supervision may take place.
A person who cannot complete a purchase through your online shop may submit a complaint. This may lead the competent market surveillance authority to assess the service. The precise procedure and the evidence requested depend on the particular service and circumstances of the case.
This is the point that catches businesses by surprise. The question is not whether anyone has complained before. It is whether you have prepared what the authority may ask you to provide.
How to prepare for questions and an inspection
The Act establishes accessibility requirements as well as requirements for providing information. The precise scope of the documentation must be confirmed for the particular service.
Accessibility information. The Act requires a service provider to make available information on how the service meets the accessibility requirements. The exact form, content and method of provision must be confirmed against the current wording of the Act and the type of service. The information must accurately describe the actual state, which requires both technical and manual verification.
A genuinely accessible service. This is where the difficulty lies. The information must describe how your service meets the requirements—and that cannot be stated accurately without testing. If you claim that the website is fully compliant but have no evidence to support the claim, you have created a potential problem. An inaccurate claim is worse than acknowledging a shortcoming that you are working to resolve.
A technical assessment uses the relevant requirements of EN 301 549 and the WCAG criteria. The required version and scope must be determined according to the applicable legal or contractual framework. In practice, the assessment covers matters such as keyboard operation, contrast, the announcement of form errors and a logical content order.
The risk that is not a fine
A fine is not the only risk. An incomplete purchase can also have an operational impact. An inaccessible online shop may lose customers without receiving a direct complaint, while a more accessible interface helps people with permanent and temporary impairments and often improves usability under everyday conditions.
What a timely technical assessment gives you
We begin with a free initial scan, which provides the first machine-detectable findings within the agreed scope. Automated checks using axe-core or IBM Equal Access can, by agreement, be integrated into CI/CD and run in prepared application states. They cover only selected machine-detectable findings, such as certain contrast issues, missing alternative attributes for images, missing form-field labels and selected errors in ARIA attributes. A person then assesses the quality of descriptions, the logic of headings, keyboard operation and screen-reader behaviour.
The output is a technical report: findings ordered by severity, references to the relevant criteria and recommended fixes. It documents the scope and outcome of the checks performed, but does not by itself demonstrate full legal compliance.
We use WCAG 2.2 as the more current professional target. For a legal or contractual assessment, the required version of the standard must be confirmed separately. A technical report does not replace legal advice.
Next step
If you do not know where your online shop stands, begin by mapping the purchase journey and the evidence already available. The next step can be a no-obligation consultation about the technical scope of the assessment.