Digital accessibility spent years being treated as a tick-box exercise, pushed to the end of a project and funded only if the budget survived that far. Those days are over. Now that the European Accessibility Act applies to digital products and services placed on the European market, an online shop, a booking platform or a customer portal sits squarely within an explicit legal framework. Companies that discover the topic through a tender questionnaire or a customer complaint usually learn the hard way that retrofitting compliance costs three to five times more than designing for it from the outset.
The framework is easy to summarise, even if the details vary between member states. The European directive leans on the EN 301 549 standard, which is itself aligned with WCAG 2.1 level AA. In France, the RGAA transposes those requirements for the public sector and, increasingly, for private companies above a certain size. In Sweden, the Agency for Digital Government plays a comparable role. Microenterprises benefit from exemptions, but they are a minority among the businesses we work with: the moment a company sells online or runs a structured digital service, the question applies.
What stands out in the audits we run is how ordinary the failures are. Exotic edge cases are rare. The same four problems come up again and again: insufficient contrast between text and background, images with no meaningful alternative text, form fields not properly associated with their labels, and navigation that breaks down at the keyboard as soon as a menu or a modal appears. On a well-built site these take days to fix. On a site assembled from visual components with no underlying HTML structure, they turn into a full rebuild.
The point decision-makers underestimate most is how closely accessibility criteria overlap with the technical quality signals Google already evaluates. A coherent heading hierarchy helps a screen reader and a crawler in exactly the same way. Descriptive alt text feeds image search. Adequate contrast improves mobile legibility, which shows up in engagement signals. Clean keyboard navigation implies semantic markup, the very thing generative engines rely on to extract passages. Working on accessibility is technical SEO under a different name.
The effect on conversion is just as tangible. A contact form whose labels are properly bound to their fields, whose errors are announced in text rather than signalled by a red border alone, whose tab order follows the visual logic, converts better for everybody. On appointment-booking flows we have measured double-digit gains in completion after nothing more than a compliance pass on the forms. None of those changes were designed as marketing optimisations.
It also helps to see the demographic picture. In Europe, one person in four reports a functional limitation, permanent or temporary. On top of that sit the situational constraints everyone experiences: reading a screen in bright sunlight, navigating one-handed on a commute, filling in a form in a noisy environment. Designing for the edges improves the experience at the centre. That principle, long argued by inclusive design practitioners, holds up in every project we deliver.
On method, we recommend working in stages rather than chasing full compliance in one sweep. The first stage secures the critical journeys: homepage, main service pages, contact form, checkout or booking flow. The second extends the work to editorial content, with authoring and publishing rules built into the content management tool. The third installs continuous verification, through automated tests in the build pipeline and a quarterly manual review of the sensitive components.
Automated tools have their place, provided you know where they stop. A scanner catches roughly a third of real failures: contrast, missing attributes, malformed structures. It will never tell you whether an alt text is relevant, whether the reading order makes sense, whether an interactive component behaves correctly at the keyboard. A serious audit always combines automation, manual keyboard navigation and a pass with a screen reader. That is the protocol we apply, and the one to demand from any supplier.
Then there is the accessibility statement. Too many companies publish a generic document, copied from a template, asserting a level of compliance nobody ever measured. That is an unnecessary legal exposure and a poor signal. An honest statement that names the level reached, lists the non-compliant content, sets out a remediation timetable and provides a working contact route protects far better than a flattering falsehood. It also reassures public buyers and large accounts, whose tender scoring grids now include the criterion.
In practice, accessibility has become a quiet commercial differentiator. In the markets we operate in, from Paris to Stockholm, it appears earlier and earlier in requirement documents, sometimes ahead of design questions. Companies that anticipated it answer in a sentence and move on. The others find out mid-tender that they need to price a full interface rebuild.
At AKREA DIGITAL, accessibility is part of the foundation of every project, not a line item billed on top. Our design and development work rests on strict semantic markup and keyboard-tested components, our digital audit includes a WCAG 2.1 AA and RGAA compliance review, and our SEO and digital performance team uses that technical foundation to improve indexing and real visitor experience at the same time.