European Accessibility Act · in force since 28 June 2025
A French court just ruled that 71% accessible is not accessible.
The court held that accessibility is an obligation of result, not of effort: a site cannot be “a bit” accessible. We scanned 290 live Shopify stores selling into Germany, France, the Netherlands, Spain, Ireland and Sweden. 287 fail, and the median has 32 broken elements — nowhere near 71%.
We will tell you your store’s number. Free, within one business day.
An illustration, not a real merchant — but every failure in it is one we measured:
- Add to cart, unreadable. White on orange is 2.73:1. The floor is 4.5:1. 82.1% of stores.
- Image with no text alternative. A screen reader announces nothing. 42.4%.
- Link with no accessible name. Announced only as “link”. 56.6%.
Our own measurement · 290 stores · six markets · 2–3 August 2026
13months the law has been in force, and counting
99%of the stores we scanned fail, on a critical or serious issue
32broken elements on the median store
728on the worst store we found
Why it would be you
Nobody audits you. Somebody reports you.
Enforcement here is complaint-driven. It does not begin with an inspector reading a list of eight million stores. It begins with one customer who could not check out and knew where to write.
Sweden’s regulator is working through 124 complaints. The Dutch ACM is sending formal information requests to e-commerce operators worldwide, including outside the EU.
And on 4 June 2026 the Tribunal judiciaire de Caen ordered Carrefour France to make carrefour.fr and its mobile application fully accessible within six months, with a penalty of €500 per day beyond the deadline plus €10,000 in damages. The case was brought by the disability associations ApiDV and Droit pluriel. Carrefour argued that meeting 71% of the applicable criteria was sufficient; the court disagreed, holding that accessibility is an obligation of result. Reported by Faire Face, E-commerce Mag and the claimants’ own case summary.
It applies by where your customer is, not where you are
Sell to a consumer in the EU and you are in scope — registered in Dublin, Denver or Guadalajara. The microenterprise exemption covers services, not products: a small store shipping physical goods into the EU does not escape through it. Maximum penalties run to €900,000 in Sweden and €600,000 in Spain; in France, 0.1% of worldwide turnover per day.
And a reason that is not fear: this is a checkout problem
Between 87 and 100 million people in the European Union live with a disability. Every broken element is somebody who reached your product page and did not reach your payment page. You are already paying for this. The invoice just does not arrive with a name on it.
What this is
We find them, fix them in your code, and prove it
Not a widget. Not an overlay. Not a PDF of recommendations.
- Evidence. An automated scan of your real templates — the exact element, the exact code, the criterion each one fails.
- A human on the buying path. Someone drives your store with a screen reader: arrive, pick a product, pick a variant, add to cart, reach payment. A lawsuit is never filed because of a list. It is filed because a person could not buy.
- Remediation in the source. We correct the violations in the actual theme code and hand back a pull request or a corrected theme, plus a before/after report you keep as evidence.
We work on a copy, and you review it before anything goes live. If a fix breaks something on your store, we revert it and correct it at our cost. You are letting someone into a theme that takes orders; that deserves saying out loud.
Pricing
Published prices. No sales call.
In US dollars, billed through Paddle as merchant of record for EU VAT.
Start here
Free Scan
$0
Automated. In one business day. No access needed.
- Home page and one real product page
- Violations by severity
- The five worst, with the exact code
Exposure Report
$250
In 72 hours.
- Ten templates, including checkout
- Manual screen-reader test of the whole buying path
- Findings ranked by risk, with effort per fix
- Draft Accessibility Statement — the EAA requires one
- Credited in full against the fix if you go ahead within 30 days
Most of the work
Fix
$2,500
In 10 working days. Start Monday, verified before month end.
- Standard Shopify or WooCommerce theme, up to 10 templates
- Every critical and serious violation corrected in the real code
- Re-scan plus a second screen-reader pass
- Pull request or corrected theme deployed
- Before/after report and Accessibility Statement
- Kept clean afterwards for $70/month. Optional, cancel any time.
We run three to four fixes at a time. This is hand-written code in your theme, not a plugin, and one person verifies every one of them with a screen reader. When those slots are taken the next start date moves out by about two weeks. We will tell you the real date before you pay, not after.
Out of scope of the $2,500 fix, quoted separately from $6,000: headless storefronts, fully custom themes, web applications, more than 10 templates, PDFs and video without captions. We publish this boundary rather than discover it halfway through.
What you are paying for
The 60% a scanner will never find
Automated scanning catches roughly 30–40% of accessibility problems. That is the central fact of this field, not small print.
Machines find missing names, missing alternatives, insufficient contrast, broken structure. They cannot tell you whether a blind customer can pick a variant or reach checkout. The remaining 60–70% needs a person testing with a screen reader. That is the part we do by hand, and the reason this costs more than a free scanner.
We will never tell you that you are “compliant”
No vendor can certify your compliance, and one that says otherwise is selling you a liability. What we report is precise: violations found and remediated, verified against WCAG 2.1 AA criteria, with evidence and a date. It does not make a complaint disappear. It changes what you can put in front of a regulator on day one: a dated record of what was broken and what you fixed, instead of nothing.
In 2025 the US Federal Trade Commission imposed a $1,000,000 order against an overlay vendor for claiming automatic conformance. Over 800 companies running an overlay were sued anyway, and courts declined to treat it as a defence. We do not sell, install or recommend overlays — not as an add-on, not “in the meantime”. In our scan of 290 European stores, not one had one installed.
This is not legal advice. We remediate technical violations against a published standard; we are not lawyers, and your Accessibility Statement should be reviewed by counsel in your market.
The study
Nobody had published this, so we measured it
305 live stores across six markets. 290 confirmed Shopify. Home page and one real product page, each tested twice — desktop and mobile, because a desktop-only audit reports a store cleaner than it is.
| What breaks | Share |
|---|---|
| Text you cannot read against its background | 82.1% |
| Links with no readable name | 56.6% |
| Images with no text alternative | 42.4% |
| Scrolling areas a keyboard cannot reach | 42.4% |
| Buttons with no name — including “add to cart” | 32.8% |
| Form fields with no label | 17.6% |
Your theme is not the problem: Dawn appeared in only 3.1% of stores, and almost nobody runs a catalogue theme unmodified. What we measure is your store, with your apps and your content — and we show you every element.
Read the full study — method, per-market data and limitations
Who we are
Verify us. Do not trust us.
You will find no client logos, testimonials or founding year here, because inventing them is exactly the behaviour that got the overlay industry fined. Here is what you can check instead.
Can They Buy? is a product of Sell with Marketing, a B2B marketing and engineering agency.
Led by Manuel García — twenty years in B2B go-to-market, previously with Colgate-Palmolive, Circle K and Quala. The agency builds and ships production software for its clients; this is the same team, pointed at one problem. One person does the screen-reader testing and writes the fixes, which is why we take three to four at a time and why you always know who touched your theme.
Written to: hello@sellwithmarketing.com · sellwithmarketing.com · Legal notice · Privacy notice
- This page passes its own audit — publicly. Zero WCAG 2.1 AA violations on desktop and mobile, and 100/100/100/100 on Google Lighthouse for performance, accessibility, best practices and SEO, measured 3 August 2026. Run axe-core or Lighthouse on this page yourself. A company selling accessibility from an inaccessible site tells you everything you need to know.
- The study is reproducible. axe-core and headless Chromium against the WCAG 2.0 A/AA and WCAG 2.1 A/AA rule sets, on 2–3 August 2026. The tool is open source and every store we measured is public. Run it yourself and check our numbers.
- We never ask for access, never set a deadline, and publish our prices. Those are the three signatures of the fake accessibility demand letters going around. We do none of them.
- Payment goes through Paddle as merchant of record — never a bank transfer to an individual.
Refunds, cancellation and legal notice
Exposure Report: if the audit finds no critical or serious violation on your store, you pay nothing and keep the report. Fix: full refund before work starts. Once started, the $250 report portion is retained and the remainder refunded pro rata against work completed. Once the corrected theme or pull request has been delivered, the fee is due in full. Watch: cancel any time, effective at the end of the current month.
Service provider: Sell with Marketing, Mexico. Contact: hello@sellwithmarketing.com. Payments are processed by Paddle.com Market Ltd. acting as merchant of record and reseller, which issues the invoice and handles EU VAT. Prices are in US dollars and exclude any taxes Paddle adds at checkout for your jurisdiction. Governing law and dispute resolution are stated in the engagement letter you receive before payment.
Free scan
Get your store’s actual number
The same scan we ran on 290 stores, against your home page and one real product page. Violations by severity, the five worst with the exact element and code, and the criterion each one fails. Within one business day.
Questions
The ones that actually get asked
You emailed me out of nowhere. How do I know this is not a scam?
Fair question — there is a documented pattern of fake accessibility demand letters, and they share three features: a deadline of about fifteen days, a request for administrator access, and no price until you reply.
We do none of those. No deadline, no access to your store, prices published on this page, and payment through Paddle as merchant of record — never a transfer to an individual. The study here is dated and reproducible: run the same tool on your own store and check our numbers.
Can my own developer or agency not do this?
Some of it, yes. But 82.1% of the damage we measured is contrast and missing accessible names — exactly what a web team does not review, because it does not look broken to someone who can see it. And almost no agency drives the whole cart and checkout with a screen reader, which is where the claims come from. If your developer wants to do the fixes, buy the $250 report and hand them the list. We will say so plainly.
What if you break something on my store?
We work on a copy — a theme export or a branch — and you review it before anything goes live. If a fix breaks something, we revert it and correct it at our cost. Nothing is deployed without your sign-off.
Do you need access to my store?
No — not for the free scan, not for the paid report. Both run against your public pages. Access only matters at the fix stage, and only in the form you choose.
Is this a compliance certificate?
No, and be careful with anyone offering one. You receive a record of violations found and remediated, verified against WCAG 2.1 AA criteria, with dates and evidence. It is not a shield and we will not describe it as one — but it is what you put in front of a regulator instead of nothing.
What exactly is a “broken element”?
One element that fails one WCAG 2.1 AA success criterion — a single button with no name, one image with no alternative text, one piece of text without enough contrast. A store with 32 broken elements has 32 specific things to correct, each with an address in the code. We hand you that list, not an adjective.