Accessibility stopped being a nice-to-have
Website accessibility compliance used to sit near the bottom of the backlog, somewhere below the blog redesign. European rules moved it. Regulators now inspect, civil society groups file complaints, and law firms send warning letters to companies that have never heard of the requirements. The change is not that accessibility became important. It became enforceable. If you sell to customers in the EU, this is now a legal question about your website rather than a design preference, and the people who find the problem first will not be your team.
The rules follow your customers, not your address
Most companies assume the requirements apply to European businesses. They apply to European markets. If you place a covered service in front of customers in the EU, your headquarters being in Istanbul, Dubai or anywhere else changes nothing. Consumer-facing services carry the clearest obligations: online shops, banking, ticketing, booking, and the apps attached to them. Check whether you sell into the EU before you decide this is somebody else's problem, because that single question decides whether the rules reach you.
What the standard actually asks for
Behind the legal language sits a practical checklist that has existed for years. Someone using only a keyboard must reach every control and see where they are. Text must hold enough contrast against its background to stay readable. Images that carry meaning need alt text, and decorative ones need none. Form fields need real labels rather than placeholder text that vanishes when you type. Video needs captions. Headings need to describe the structure of the page instead of being chosen for their size. None of this is exotic. Most of it is what a careful build produces anyway.
Where most sites fail
The same handful of problems appear on almost every site we audit. Light grey text on white, chosen because it looked calm in the design file. Forms built from styled divs that a screen reader announces as nothing. Custom dropdowns and modals that trap keyboard focus. Icon-only buttons with no accessible name, so a screen reader says "button" and stops. Carousels that move on their own and cannot be paused. Each one is small on its own. Together they make a site unusable for a real group of your customers.
The overlay trap
A market of widgets promises compliance from one line of JavaScript. They do not deliver it. An overlay sits on top of your markup and guesses at meaning it cannot see, which is why users who depend on assistive technology often report that overlays make the experience worse. Regulators and courts have not treated them as a defence. Buying one gives you a badge in the corner of your site and leaves the underlying problems where they were. Fix the markup instead. It costs more attention and it is the only thing that holds up.
Talk to us about your website on WhatsAppOne site, several regulators
Enforcement runs country by country. A site serving customers across several EU markets answers to each national authority separately, and one settlement does not close the others. Penalties differ by country and the published figures are not small. The practical risk for most companies is not a headline fine, though. It is the cost and disruption of fixing a live site under a deadline set by someone else, with a regulator waiting, instead of fixing it on your own schedule.
The part that pays for itself
Accessibility work improves the site for people who have no disability at all. Better contrast helps anyone reading on a phone in daylight. Proper labels and heading structure make forms faster and pages easier to scan. Captions get watched in offices and on silent commutes. Search engines read the same semantic structure that screen readers do, so clean markup tends to help visibility too. This is the rare compliance task that leaves you with a better product rather than a thicker folder of documentation.
Where to start
Run an automated scan first, knowing it catches perhaps a third of real issues. Then test by hand: unplug the mouse and try to complete your main conversion path using only the keyboard. Most teams find their first serious problem within two minutes. Fix templates and shared components before individual pages, because a header, a form and a card fixed once repair hundreds of pages at a stroke. Then write the rules into how you build, so the next redesign does not reintroduce everything you just repaired.
Written by
Idennex
Strategy-first agency, Istanbul