EN26 August 20268 min read

The EAA applies to your Shopify store even if you're not in the EU — a 10-minute triage

The European Accessibility Act has applied since 28 June 2025, and it follows the same logic as GDPR: what matters is where your customers are, not where your company is registered. A Shopify store in Toronto, Tbilisi or Texas that sells to consumers in the EU is offering a service in the EU market — and e-commerce is explicitly one of the services the Act covers. Here's how to work out in about ten minutes whether you're in scope and what to actually do.

Step 1 — Are you in scope? (2 minutes)

Two questions decide most cases:

1. Do you sell to consumers in the EU? Shipping to EU countries, EU currencies or domains, EU-targeted marketing — any of these point to yes. B2B-only stores are outside the consumer-facing scope.
2. Are you a micro-enterprise? Service providers with fewer than 10 employees and at most €2 million annual turnover or balance-sheet total are exempt from the Act's service obligations — and an online shop counts as such a service. Many small merchants are legitimately out of scope. Two honest caveats: you should be able to show the numbers if asked, and national implementations differ in details (Germany's BFSG, for instance, still expects a market-surveillance authority to be able to check your claim).

If you're exempt, write down why, date it, and move on with your life. If you're not — keep reading; the rest takes eight minutes.

Step 2 — What enforcement actually looks like in 2026

Worth being precise here, because this category is full of invented scare statistics. What has verifiably happened so far:

• France: in June 2026 a court ordered a major retailer to make its site fully accessible within six months, under a penalty of €500 per day of delay. Courts are willing to attach real money to accessibility.
• Germany: waves of competitor warning letters (Abmahnungen) have hit online shops since mid-2025. Specialist lawyers consider many of them legally shaky — but answering one still costs time, legal fees and nerves.
• Regulator audits have begun in several member states, typically starting with a letter asking what you've done — not with a fine.

Equally important is what has not happened: we know of no administrative fine issued purely for an inaccessible web shop anywhere in the EU as of August 2026. The realistic near-term risk isn't a surprise penalty — it's receiving a letter (from a regulator, a competitor's lawyer, or an enterprise customer's procurement team) and having nothing to show. Every response to such a letter starts with the same question: what have you done, and can you prove when you did it?

Step 3 — The triage checklist (8 minutes)

1. Run an automated scan of your published theme. Any reputable WCAG 2.1 AA scanner. This finds the machine-detectable issues — typically missing alt text, unlabelled form fields, buttons without accessible names, weak colour contrast. Expect findings; almost every theme has them.
2. Do the two-minute keyboard test. Unplug your mouse and try to buy something using only Tab, Enter and the arrow keys. If you can't reach the checkout, neither can a screen-reader user — and no scanner needed to tell you.
3. Fix at the theme level, not with an overlay. Most fixes are one-line edits in a Liquid file: an alt attribute, a label, an aria-label on an icon button. Overlay widgets that claim to fix accessibility with one script do not remove the issues from your code — in recent years more than a fifth of US accessibility lawsuits hit sites that had a widget installed.
4. Publish an accessibility statement. The EU-model statement declares your current conformance status honestly (almost always “partially conformant”), what you're doing about it, and how users can reach you. In several member states it's an explicit requirement; everywhere it's the first document anyone asks for.
5. Start a dated record and keep it running. Scan, fix, re-scan, keep the reports. A folder of dated evidence showing continuous work is the single most useful thing you can hold when any letter arrives.

Deutschsprachige Händler: was zu tun ist, wenn bereits eine Abmahnung im Briefkasten liegt, steht in unserem Leitfaden zur BFSG-Abmahnung.