All online shops will have to be accessible – are you ready?
Introduction
From 28 June 2025, all online shops in Hungary will be required to be barrier-free. This is not just a nice-sounding directive, it is a legal obligation that is monitored by the consumer protection authority. Accessible online shops ensure that people with disabilities can fully use online shops, including shopping, navigation and access to information.
This can be particularly important:
- For visually impaired customers using screen reading software,
- For users with reduced mobility who navigate using only a keyboard,
- For colour vision impaired and visually impaired users,
- For hearing impaired people.
Accessibility is not only a mandatory requirement, but can also be a business benefit, improving SEO performance, increasing the customer base, helping to highlight a brand’s social responsibility and providing a better user experience.
Legal background
According to Act XVII of 2022, the mandatory nature of accessibility includes the following elements:
- Accessibility statement: All online shops must publish a statement on their level of accessibility.
- Feedback option: Users should be given the opportunity to report any accessibility problems.
- Compliance documentation: Businesses must demonstrate that they comply with the requirements of the Act.
How to make an online shop accessible?
There are many areas involved in ensuring accessibility of online shops, here are the main requirements without being exhaustive:
- Content availability
- Ensuring screen reader compatibility.
- Alternative text descriptions for the images.
- Use of structured headers and menus.
- Keyboard-friendly operation
- All the functions of the webshop should be accessible without a mouse.
- Provide navigation facilities (e.g. “Skip to content” button).
- Appropriate visual presentation
- Easy to read fonts.
- Providing contrasting colours.
- Clearly visible buttons and links.
- Hassle-free checkout process
- Clear and easy to understand forms.
- Ensure accurate error messages.
- Downloadable documents
- PDF and other documents should also be available in text format.
- Ensure proper structure and readability.
How can Ecommsolvers help?
From Ecommsolvers Ltd. specializes in the development of web stores, with a particular focus on Magento and WooCommerce based systems. We have accessibility developments underway on a number of our own projects, and we have built and have the expertise to implement this for our own solutions, which are not yet ready, and for other web stores. For Magento and WooCommerce based webshops, whether self-developed or for external projects, we undertake accessibility.
How do we work?
It is recommended to start by carrying out a accessibility surveyduring which:
- We use automated tools to test the current status of the webshop,
- We also do manual testing, here AI assistants assist you in your work,
- We bring together the most important shortcomingsand rank them,
- We estimate the number of hours for each repair, so it is easy to determine what level of accessibility can be achieved.
If your online store is based on Magento or WooCommerce and you want to ensure accessibility compliance, please contact us! We can help you with the development of your own projects or with the accessibility of other webshops.
