How a European Retailer Achieved EAA Compliance in 90 Days
A practical case study of implementing WCAG 2.1 AA compliance on a large e-commerce site — timeline, costs, and lessons learned.
When a mid-size European online retailer with 500,000+ monthly visitors realized they needed EAA compliance, they had 90 days and a limited budget. Here's how they went from 47 critical WCAG violations to zero — and what it cost.
Starting point
- 47 critical WCAG 2.1 AA violations across key pages
- 156 total violations (critical + moderate)
- No accessibility statement
- Zero keyboard navigation support in the checkout flow
- Product images without alt text (18,000+ images)
- Color contrast failures across the entire site
The 90-day plan
- Full automated scan + manual keyboard testing of key user journeys
- Violations categorized by severity, user impact, and effort to fix
- Prioritization: checkout flow > product pages > navigation > content pages
- Color contrast updated site-wide (CSS variable changes, surprisingly manageable)
- Form labels added to all checkout and account forms
- Keyboard navigation implemented for checkout and navigation
- Skip-to-content link added
- Focus indicators restored (they had been removed for "design reasons")
- Alt text added to 18,000+ product images (combination of AI-generated descriptions reviewed by humans and manual writing for key products)
- ARIA landmarks added to page structure
- Heading hierarchy corrected
- Accessibility statement published at /accessibility
- Automated monitoring configured for CI/CD pipeline
- Feedback form created and linked from statement
Cost
- External accessibility consultant (audit + remediation guidance): €12,000
- Development time (internal team): ~320 hours (~€18,000 loaded cost)
- AI alt text generation tool: €2,000
- Automated monitoring tool: €3,000/year
Results
- Zero critical WCAG 2.1 AA violations
- 12 remaining moderate issues (all with documented remediation timeline)
- 15% increase in checkout completion for mobile users (accessibility improvements often improve usability for everyone)
- Accessibility statement published and regularly updated
- Ongoing automated scanning catches regressions before deployment
Lessons learned
- Start with the user journey, not the page count. Fixing checkout and navigation covers the majority of user impact.
- Color contrast changes are high-impact, low-effort. Updating CSS variables fixed hundreds of violations in hours.
- Alt text at scale requires automation + human review. Pure manual writing for 18,000 images would have blown the timeline.
- Accessibility improves UX for everyone. The checkout flow improvements benefited all users, not just those with disabilities.