German webshop accessibility, 2026

Key findings

Percentages are of 9,614 confirmed webshops on .de domains. The critical-barrier figure carries a 95% confidence interval of 62.6–64.5%.

The buying path: the product page is the weak spot

A shop can have a tidy homepage and still be hard to buy from. Among the shops where we tested both a product page and the cart, 55.9% had a critical barrier on the product page, against 33.7% in the cart. Product pages typically hold the most interactive parts — galleries, variant pickers, reviews; the cart is simpler.

Counting pages that are free of serious and critical barriers: 86.7% of shops with three or more tested pages had no such page at all, and only 3.1% of all shops were clean on every page we tested.

Five fixes that clear most critical barriers

Critical barriers cluster around a few rules. If these five were fixed on the pages we tested, 79.7% of shops would have no critical barrier left. That is our calculation from the scan data, not a prediction for any one shop.

• image-alt

  Images without a text alternative

  Give every informative image a short text alternative; mark purely decorative images as decorative.

  Found in 33.1% of shops

• button-name

  Buttons without an accessible name

  Every button, including icon-only ones, needs text or a label that says what it does.

  Found in 21.8% of shops

• aria-required-children

  Custom widgets missing the child elements their role expects

  Menus, tabs and lists built with ARIA roles must contain the child elements those roles expect — or use plain HTML instead.

  Found in 17.1% of shops

• label

  Form fields without a label

  Every form field needs a label that is programmatically linked to it, not just placeholder text.

  Found in 16% of shops

• select-name

  Dropdowns without a label

  A dropdown needs a label exactly like a text field does.

  Found in 14.1% of shops

The failures are just as concentrated overall: colour contrast alone accounts for 56.6% of all failing elements we counted, and the top three rules (color-contrast, link-name, target-size) for 76.9%. A short, focused clean-up goes a long way.

The most common failures

Share of shops with at least one failing element for each rule, with the WCAG success criterion it maps to.

Platform fingerprints

Shops on different platforms fail in different ways. For each platform the table shows the share of shops with a critical barrier and the rule that is most over-represented there compared with German shops overall. WooCommerce shops had the fewest critical barriers in this sample.

This measures shops built on each platform, not the platforms themselves. A theme, a plugin or the agency that built the shop can account for what the scanner sees, and this data cannot separate those. Only platforms with at least 150 tested shops are shown.

Industry league table

Share of shops with a critical barrier, by the category the shop is listed under in the directory (categories with at least 40 shops; names as listed in the German directory). Finanzen & Versicherungen is lowest at 45.2%, Hobby, Sammeln & Freizeitartikel highest at 73.7%. The gaps are real but modest — no category is anywhere near clean.

A yardstick: how many failing elements per page is normal?

Counting every failing element on each tested page, the typical German webshop has 17 per page. One shop in ten has 2 or fewer; one in ten has 56 or more. Use it as a rough yardstick for your own scan — a count is a guide, not a grade.

A published statement does not predict an accessible shop

701 shops had an accessibility statement we could open. They were no better off on critical barriers: 63.3% had one, against 63.6% of shops with no statement we could find. They were more likely to be free of serious barriers altogether (6% vs 2.9%), but still a small minority — a statement is a document about a service, not evidence that the service works. The count is a lower bound: we only opened a statement page when a shop had no checkout link.

Germany and the Netherlands

In September 2026 we ran the same scanner with the same rules on 7,122 Dutch webshops. Germany comes out lower on critical barriers (63.6% vs 69%), but the two shop lists are not comparable enough for a ranking of countries.

The shop lists differ — the Dutch one comes from a Dutch directory and association lists, the German one from the Trusted Shops directory, whose shops opted into a trust-seal programme. The scanner and the rule set are the same.

Read the Dutch study