Online store accessibility from 28 June 2025: what to check in your theme and plugins

Since 28 June 2025, an online store that sells to consumers has to be accessible to people with disabilities. Here is the interesting part: in practice, whether your online store accessibility holds up depends mostly on your theme and plugins, not on the content itself. If you know their typical weak spots, you can check the store faster and get to the fixes sooner.

Who has to meet online store accessibility requirements from 28 June 2025?

Businesses running e-commerce aimed at consumers. Poland implements the European Accessibility Act through the Polish act on product and service accessibility, published as Dz.U. 2024 item 731 and applicable from 28 June 2025. E-commerce services are listed in it explicitly, so there is no room for creative interpretation. There is one exemption: microenterprises providing services. Does your business qualify? Check that against the act itself, not by guesswork. In practice, the WCAG guidelines serve as the technical point of reference.

What does WCAG mean for a store in practice?

WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) are international guidelines on how to build websites that people with disabilities can use too. They rest on four principles. Each one translates easily into specific parts of a store:

• Perceivable - product images have alternative text, and price and stock status are not shown by colour alone.
• Operable - you can reach the cart and payment without a mouse.
• Understandable - form error messages say what needs fixing.
• Robust - the code works with screen readers and different browsers.

Where to start? With the places where a customer can get stuck: search, product page, cart, login, checkout, payment. The rest can wait.

How do you check a theme for accessibility?

Put the mouse away. It is the simplest test I know: go through the store using only the keyboard and compare what you see with a short checklist. A theme accessibility audit should cover:

• operating every element with Tab, Enter and the arrow keys,
• a visible focus, meaning an outline that shows the active element,
• contrast of text, buttons and form fields,
• a logical heading hierarchy and a correct lang attribute,
• a skip navigation link that jumps straight to the content.

Mobile menus, sliders and carousels must be possible to pause, and their buttons must be labelled. In product page and listing templates, look at image alts and variant descriptions. Also check whether a screen reader reads the price correctly (the sale price tends to break). Oh, and themes built on page builders can output really messy code. So test the finished page. An author’s claim of compliance is just a claim.

Which plugins and modules break accessibility most often?

Anything that pops up over the content or changes it on the fly. Cookie consent banners and popups often trap the focus or refuse to close from the keyboard. Contact forms, newsletter sign-ups and checkout? Sometimes fields have no labels, the error message sits somewhere nearby without being tied to the field, and the CAPTCHA has no alternative at all. Product filters, AJAX search, chats and review widgets swap content silently, without a word to the screen reader. And a separate story: payment gateways and pickup point maps embedded in an iframe. Here the store owner has very limited control.

So WooCommerce accessibility and PrestaShop accessibility depend largely on add-ons. If a plugin cannot be fixed, you are left with replacing or adapting it. At K4.pl you will find WooCommerce plugins and PrestaShop modules with updates and support. And if an off-the-shelf solution does not fit, you can order a plugin built for your specific store.

How do you run a quick audit step by step?

A few simple manual tests plus an automated scan. That is it. The order matters:

1. Go through the purchase path using only the keyboard, from search to order confirmation.
2. Repeat it with a screen reader, for example NVDA on Windows or VoiceOver on Mac and iPhone.
3. Run an automated scanner as a first filter for obvious errors.
4. Check the contrast of text, buttons and messages.
5. Zoom in on the page in the browser and see whether the layout falls apart.

Do not trust automated tools blindly. They catch only some of the problems, because they cannot judge whether a description makes sense or whether the focus moves in a logical order. Log issues separately for the theme, plugins and content. Top priority? Anything that affects buying.

What should you do after the audit to keep your online store accessible?

Purchase blockers first, meaning anything that stops someone from adding a product to the cart, logging in or paying. Smaller issues later. The catch is that a theme or plugin update can quietly undo earlier fixes, so repeat the keyboard test after every major change. Content counts too: new product photos need alts, and descriptions must not convey information through colour alone. The act also requires you to publish information on how your service meets accessibility requirements. I recommend agreeing the scope of that information with a lawyer.

In my view, online store accessibility is best treated as a regular part of site maintenance, alongside backups and updates. A one-off project will go stale with the first theme change. A regular test takes a dozen or so minutes and shows straight away what has broken. No reason to put it off.

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