Häufig gestellte Fragen

No — Shopify handles hosting, checkout, and payments, but whether your storefront meets WCAG 2.1 AA depends almost entirely on your theme and installed apps. Common issues include missing product-image alt text, cart drawers that trap keyboard focus, and third-party apps (review widgets, popups) with no keyboard support.

An overlay-style plugin can't fix markup problems in your theme or checkout plugin — it injects a widget on top of the page without changing the underlying HTML a screen reader actually reads. WordPress core has an active accessibility team, but your specific theme and payment-gateway plugin are where real issues usually live.

It applies based on where your customers are, not where your business is registered — if you sell consumer-facing products or services (e-commerce, banking, e-books, transport ticketing, and more) to people in the EU, the EAA applies to you, even if your company is based outside the EU. It's been in force for in-scope private-sector services since 28 June 2025.

Each EU member state designates its own enforcement authority and penalties under its national transposition law, so consequences vary by country — but enforcement is real and active: French authorities have issued injunctions, the Netherlands' ACM has been auditing sites, and Italy's AgID has treated this as a priority enforcement year. Beyond formal penalties, an EAA accessibility statement is a public document — its absence is visible to anyone who checks.

Annex V of the Directive requires it to cover: the scope of what's being assessed, your current conformance status against the technical standard, any content that isn't yet accessible and why, a feedback mechanism for visitors to report issues, and the date it was last reviewed. Our free statement checker and generator walk through each of these using your site's real details.

Only if you qualify as a micro-enterprise: fewer than 10 employees AND annual turnover or balance sheet total under €2 million — both conditions, not either. The exemption covers services, not products placed on the market, and it stops applying immediately the moment you cross either threshold, with no grace period.

There's no single EU-wide fine — each member state sets its own. Published maximums range from €60,000 in Ireland to over €1 million in Hungary and Spain, with Italy tying penalties to a percentage of annual turnover instead of a fixed cap. Beyond fines, enforcement can include mandatory audits, product/service withdrawal, and daily penalties until an issue is fixed.

Broadly, any service you offer to consumers rather than exclusively to other businesses — ecommerce, banking, transport ticketing, e-books, and telecommunications services are all explicitly in scope. A purely B2B service with no direct consumer offering sits outside the EAA's scope, though many businesses offer both and need to assess each service separately.

Cluesia's scanner runs axe-core and Pa11y against every page you scan, mapped to WCAG 2.1 AA and EN 301 549. Automated testing detects a subset of WCAG success criteria — industry estimates put automated coverage around 30–57% — so full conformance can't be confirmed by automated testing alone. Every report states this coverage limitation on its cover page.

Fixed prices, shown before you sign up — see our pricing page for current figures. For context, accessibility audit agencies typically charge €2,000–7,000 for comparable work; automated audits are meant to be a faster, cheaper first pass — they detect a subset of WCAG criteria, not all of them, which is exactly why we're priced at a fraction of the cost.

Yes — set a site's market to "US" and your audit produces a VPAT/ACR instead of an EU-style accessibility statement, from the same underlying scan. WCAG 2.1 AA (what we test for every audit) is a strict superset of Section 508's older WCAG 2.0 AA baseline and meets ADA Title II's requirement directly. See our US compliance guide for how Title II, Section 508, and Title III differ.

Our monitoring subscription re-scans your site weekly and alerts you when it detects new or regressed findings, so issues get caught before your next full audit rather than sitting undetected for months. This matters because the EAA's conformity assessment isn't a one-time check — it needs revisiting roughly every 5 years or whenever your service changes materially.

No — an accessibility statement is a separate, specifically-required document under the EAA (following Annex V's structure), distinct from GDPR-driven documents like a cookie or privacy policy. Having one doesn't substitute for the other; most sites need both.

Whenever your compliance status materially changes — after a redesign, after fixing findings from an audit, or at minimum on a regular review cycle (annually is a common baseline). A statement that describes a version of your site that no longer exists is more likely to draw scrutiny than one that's simply out of date by a few weeks.

In some member states, yes in practice — private actors in Germany have reportedly sent warning letters to non-compliant sites independent of any government enforcement action, and that pattern isn't limited to a single country long-term. Waiting for a formal regulatory complaint isn't the same as being at no risk in the meantime.

WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) is the W3C's technical standard for web accessibility, organised around four principles — content must be Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, and Robust — at three conformance levels (A, AA, AAA). Level AA is the baseline the EU and US both actually require in practice. See our WCAG 2.1 AA guide for the full criteria list, grouped by principle.

Yes, indirectly in most cases. The EU's EAA points to it via the harmonised standard EN 301 549. In the US, DOJ's 2024 rule adopts WCAG 2.1 AA directly for state and local government sites under ADA Title II, and it's the benchmark courts converge on for private businesses under Title III, even though there's no codified federal regulation for that segment yet.

A VPAT (Voluntary Product Accessibility Template) is a standardised template vendors fill out to document how a digital product conforms to accessibility standards — once completed, it's called an ACR (Accessibility Conformance Report). It's the US equivalent of an EU accessibility statement, most often required for Section 508 (federal agencies and contractors). Cluesia generates a VPAT/ACR automatically for sites set to the US market.

WCAG 2.2 (a W3C Recommendation since October 2023) adds 9 new success criteria — mostly around focus visibility, target size, drag-gesture alternatives, and easier authentication — and removes one, 4.1.1 Parsing, which modern browsers made obsolete.

For EAA compliance today, WCAG 2.1 AA is still the operative baseline — the current version of EN 301 549 (V3.2.1) incorporates 2.1, not 2.2. A future EN 301 549 version is expected to incorporate WCAG 2.2 once formally adopted; until then, 2.1 AA is what's actually being checked.

EN 301 549 is the broader European standard covering ICT accessibility generally (websites, apps, hardware); for web content specifically, it incorporates WCAG 2.1 AA by reference rather than defining separate rules. An EU accessibility statement correctly cites both together for exactly this reason.