European Accessibility Act checklist

Pages

Follow a customer. Home, a collection, a product with options, a product with a long description, the cart, the start of checkout, contact, delivery and returns, and one page with video. Write the URLs down. You will rescan the same list after the fixes.

Ten URLs fit the free scan. Fifty fit the £49 audit. Monitoring repeats the crawl on a schedule so you are not keeping the list in one person's head.

The checks

The html element has a lang that matches the page. The document title names the product or the policy. Headings do not skip, and the product name is a heading. Informative images have alt text that is not a file name. Decorative images have an empty alt.

Normal text, including the price, is at least 4.5:1 against the immediate background. Large text is at least 3:1. Buttons and links have names. Fields have visible labels. Radio groups have a legend. Errors are text. The menu, the options and the cart work from the keyboard. Focus is visible and not buried under a sticky bar. Video with speech has captions. At 320 pixels the page reflows, and only a real data table scrolls sideways.

Mark a row done only after a retest

Note the URL, the failure, the person who will edit it, and the date it was fixed. AltGrade stores the score, the issue, and the comparison with the previous scan. Keep your own notes for the items a scanner cannot judge, such as whether the alt text is actually true.

Do not tick a row because a widget offers a contrast slider. The next customer still loads your template. Tick the row when the theme or the content has changed and you have opened the URL again.

Run it

Scan the URL list. You get a score and the top five groups immediately, and the rest of that scan by email. Use the contrast checker while you tune one pair of colours. Use the statement generator when you want a UK, European Accessibility Act, or US draft to edit.

Starter monitoring is £19 a month. No tax is added. Paying does not shrink the checklist. It dates the record and puts platform steps next to each finding.

How to use the rows

Print the list or keep it in the same doc as the scan. One owner per row. Design owns colour. Merchandising owns alt text. Engineering owns focus, labels and the keyboard path.

Mark a row done only when a second person can complete it without the mouse. A green tick on a spreadsheet is not a retest. Run the free scan again after the theme is published, then the £49 audit if you want the PDF for the file.

Captions, contrast and form errors are the rows shops skip because they look like polish. They are the rows customers feel. Do those before you rewrite the brand story. Then rescan the same URLs today.

Questions