Catch the accessibility barriers that cost you customers — before someone else finds them

Paste a public web address. EveryShopper reads the HTML that page’s server actually sends and returns a report you can act on: each finding, the element itself, what it means for a real visitor, and how to fix it — ranked so the worst comes first.

Every report also draws an explicit line between what an automated check can honestly decide and what needs a person or a rendered browser. That line is the product, not a disclaimer.

Left unaddressed, these barriers surface in the wrong order: a customer who gives up at checkout, a client who spots it before you do, or a tender that asks you to prove accessibility.

Who this is for

Online stores — and where the duty actually bites

You have a shop built on a platform you did not write, a developer you speak to occasionally, and no accessibility specialist on staff. You need to know what is actually broken on your pages, in words you can forward to whoever maintains the site — and the four markets are not equivalent. Where a shop of your size stands:

UK — any size. A duty to make reasonable adjustments, with no employee or turnover threshold.
Ontario — small organisations included. One employee in the province is enough for a named standard: WCAG 2.0 Level AA.
EU — covered above the micro-enterprise line. Fewer than 10 employees and up to €2m turnover or balance sheet is exempt, which is most small shops.
US — no rule, but real and unsettled risk. No statute or rule names a WCAG level for a private store; California’s Unruh Act damages start at $4,000 per offence.

We report what is on your pages. We do not tell you which of these applies to you.

Agencies that build and maintain those stores

You are the person the store owner forwards it to. What you need is a per-client report you can hand over without rewriting it, and — the part a one-off report cannot give you — a dated record of how each check compares with the one before it.

Your exposure is the number of sites you maintain, not the size of any one client. The barriers show up as client complaints, a client spotting something you missed, or a tender that asks you to prove accessibility before you get the work.

Agencies also sit differently to the size rules we found: the EU’s micro-enterprise exemption is written around the business providing the e-commerce service — the shop, not the studio that builds it. A client falling below the threshold does not reduce the number of sites you have to check.

On the law, plainly

Accessibility duties exist in all four markets we cover, but they differ in who they bind and in what they require — and in only one of them does a law name a WCAG level for ordinary online stores. This is what the instruments themselves say, market by market. Small stores are often outside the specific statute and inside the general anti-discrimination duty; both are risks, and neither is a certificate.

EU — Covered above micro-enterprise size

Since 28 June 2025, EU rules on accessible products and services cover online shops sold to consumers — but micro-enterprises (fewer than 10 employees, with turnover or a balance sheet of up to €2m) are exempt, and that is a large share of small stores. The e-commerce requirements are narrow: accessible identification, security and payment, plus passing on information about the accessibility of the products being sold. They are not a whole-site WCAG level.

Still open: the definition turns on a consumer contract, so a shop selling only to other businesses is arguably outside it — we have not verified how member states read that.

UK — A duty with no size threshold

Any business providing services to the public owes a duty to make reasonable adjustments, and there is no size threshold — a small shop with a website is within scope in principle. What limits that duty is the word “reasonable” and the need for a substantial disadvantage. The UK regulations that name WCAG (Level A and AA, as a presumption of conformity) apply to public sector bodies, not to shops.

Still open: the duty above is the Equality Act 2010, which binds service providers in Great Britain; Northern Ireland runs a separate disability discrimination regime, and we have not verified how it reaches online stores.

US — Unsettled litigation risk, not a rule

No statute or rule requires a private online store to meet a WCAG level. The Department of Justice's stated position is that the ADA's non-discrimination and effective-communication duties extend to the websites of businesses open to the public, but there is no DOJ rule naming a WCAG level for private stores. In California, damages under the Unruh Civil Rights Act start at $4,000 per offence plus attorney's fees.

Still open: whether an online-only store is a “place of public accommodation” at all is case law, not settled rule — and it is the question a shop like yours turns on.

Canada — Ontario names a standard, and it reaches small organisations

Ontario's accessibility law applies to organisations with at least one employee in Ontario, including small ones, and requires WCAG 2.0 Level AA web content — a lower version than most people assume. Canada's federal Accessible Canada Act applies to federally regulated organisations, not to ordinary retailers.

Still open: whether an out-of-province online store selling to Ontarians is an obligated organisation, and the position in Manitoba, Nova Scotia and British Columbia — we have not verified either.

Our own standard, stated plainly: we check a site against WCAG 2.1 A and AA criteria, because that is the level most current standards conversations assume — not because any law requires it of you. Our 27 checks cover the A and AA success criteria that can be decided from the served HTML alone: a subset of that level, and never a claim of conformance. Where a law does name a standard, the versions differ: WCAG 2.0 AA in Ontario, WCAG 2.1 AA for US state and local government, WCAG 2.0 A and AA for US federal agencies, and no version at all for private stores in the US and the UK.

We do not tell you that your site complies with accessibility law in any market. Courts, regulators and procurement rules decide that; we report findings and prioritise fixes.

What the claims above rest on — so you can check them

All markets: Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1, W3C Recommendation — the standard we check against
EU: Directive (EU) 2019/882, the European Accessibility Act — Arts. 2, 3, 4(5) and Annex I §IV(g)
UK: Equality Act 2010, ss. 20 and 29
UK, public sector: Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No. 2) Accessibility Regulations 2018, SI 2018/952 — regs. 3, 6, 9
US: Department of Justice guidance on web accessibility and the ADA (ada.gov, 2022)
US: 42 U.S.C. § 12182, ADA Title III
US, California: California Civil Code § 52, Unruh Civil Rights Act damages
US, state and local: 28 CFR 35.200, DOJ Title II web rule (89 FR 31320, 2024-07758) — WCAG 2.1 Level AA
US, federal: 36 CFR part 1194, Revised Section 508 standards, E205.4 and E207.2 — WCAG 2.0 A and AA
Ontario: O. Reg. 191/11, ss. 2, 3(1), 14(4), under the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act, 2005
Canada, federal: Accessible Canada Act, S.C. 2019, c. 10, s. 7(1)

These are the instruments we read when we wrote this page. We name them so you can check them yourself. We are not lawyers, this is not legal advice, and it is not a statement about your store.

What a finding looks like

No signup needed to see the output, so here is a real one: the severest finding that came with a piece of markup to show, from our own scan of the home page of a UK coffee retailer, fetched 2026-09-25 22:48 UTC. It is one of 45 affected elements on that page. The site is described rather than named: no site we scanned is named on this page, and nothing here says one agreed to be shown.

Critical

Image has no alt attribute

8 elements affected on this page · Images ·Related to WCAG 1.1.1 Non-text Content (A) — not a pass/fail verdict · rule image-alt-missing

ul.navbar-nav > li.dropdown > a#dp-d1-2 > span > img.d-inline

<img class="d-inline mb-1 ml-1 fillable" style="transform: rotate(90deg);" src="/assets/icons/fillable/navbar-arrow.svg" >

ul.navbar-nav > li.dropdown > a#dp-d1-4 > span > img.d-inline

<img class="d-inline mb-1 ml-1 fillable" style="transform: rotate(90deg);" src="/assets/icons/fillable/navbar-arrow.svg" >

ul.navbar-nav > li.dropdown > a#dp-d1-5 > span > img.d-inline

<img class="d-inline mb-1 ml-1 fillable" style="transform: rotate(90deg);" src="/assets/icons/fillable/navbar-arrow.svg" >

What this means

A screen reader cannot describe the image, so a person who cannot see it hears the file name or nothing. If the image is a link or a button, the control becomes unusable.

How to fix it

Add alt="" if the image is purely decorative. Otherwise write alt text that says what the image conveys in this context — a short phrase, not a file name.

What this check cannot tell you: We cannot judge whether alt text is accurate or useful. Only a human can.

You can run the same checks yourself, on a page of your own — scan a page and read the whole report. Counts drift on a live site, so your run can differ from ours.

Why a scan is not enough on its own

A scan is a photograph. Most accessibility faults appear with new code, not with age: a template change drops an alt attribute, a redesign loses the skip link, a new banner ships a control with no name. The question that decides whether anything gets fixed is not “is this page broken?” but “did it change since the last check, and was it worse before?”

A change caught between two dated scans

Differences between two dated scans, so a new fault is a new fault and not an argument about whether it was always there.

A dated record per page

A series of real scans with real timestamps — the thing that survives a change of developer, agency or platform.

A report you can forward

For an agency, one per client per period, produced from that client’s own data instead of written from memory — once the export is built.

And here is where we are: monitoring is not running for any paying customer yet — the loop has run on our own site before, and it now runs on one store we do not own, whose owner asked us in writing to have it checked, free, as a pilot — and there is no way to put yours into it: no account, no signup, no alerts sent to a customer. You can see the scans we collected by hand for that argument, real scans with real timestamps, on the monitoring page. The four tiers, and the single price that exists — £19 — are on pricing, alongside a form that asks for early access — no checkout, no card, no charge.

What we will not tell you

We will not tell you that your site complies with accessibility law in any market, with WCAG, or with anything else, and we will not tell you that a law applies to your store. We describe what the instruments we have read say and label the open questions as open; regulators, courts and procurement decide the rest.
We will not claim an industry-wide legal WCAG level for shops, because there is none. In three of our four markets no law names a WCAG level for a private online store; Ontario is the exception, and it names WCAG 2.0 Level AA.
We will not tell you an automated scan is the same as an audit. It is not, at any price, and every report says so in the same words on every run.
We will not show you a number we did not measure. Here is the full list of checks, each with what it looks for and what it cannot see.

These are findings from automated checks on the HTML this page's server sent. Automated checks find a subset of real barriers, they do not certify compliance, and they do not replace a human or rendered check.

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