Accessibility · WCAG 2.1 AA
Vonk AI checks your shop against WCAG 2.1 AA — the standard the European Accessibility Act points to — and sends you a report in plain language: what is broken, who it affects, and where on the page it sits.
Request a free scan See what we found in 247 shops
No script we place on your site, no badge, no subscription you have to sign today. A measurement you can verify yourself: every point in the report comes with the code it refers to.
yourshop.com
WCAG 2.1 AA
3 kinds of problem that shut visitors out
Images are missing a text alternative
24×
Blind visitors hear nothing at all where your product photos are.
Buttons have no name
3×
“Add to basket” included: a blind visitor cannot tell what it does.
Text has too little contrast against the background
11×
People with low vision, and anyone reading your site in the sun.
What we measure
Accessibility sounds abstract until you see what it is about. Thirty seconds of video first, then the four problems we run into most often on shop pages.
On screen throughout is the same product page: a photo, the title “Storm Rain Jacket”, the price, a size selector and an “Add to basket” button. An amber outline moves across those four elements, and next to it appears what screen reader software makes of them.
It closes with: we measure which of these things are missing.
An image with no description is simply empty as far as software is concerned. On a shop page that is usually the product itself.
Who this affects: blind visitors hear nothing at all where your product photos are.
A button made only of an icon often has no readable name. That happens to the “Add to basket” button too.
Who this affects: a blind visitor cannot tell what will happen when they press it.
Light grey on white looks calm on a good screen in a dark room. Outside that room it disappears.
Who this affects: people with low vision, and anyone looking at your site on a phone in bright sunlight.
A collapsed menu or a closed pop-up sometimes stays reachable with the tab key while there is nothing to see.
Who this affects: keyboard users end up in invisible fields and lose track of where they are.
This is not only about visitors who are blind.
A broken wrist, a phone in the sun, a mouse that gives up, getting older. Most people run into this sooner or later.
Our own measurement
We scanned 247 shops that carry one of the two Dutch e-commerce trust marks, Thuiswinkel Waarborg and Webshop Keurmerk. One page per shop, the same measurement for everyone. This is what came out.
One fault in a shop theme can appear forty times on a single page, once on every product card. “Forty problems found” would be true and misleading at the same time. So we lead with the number of kinds of problem, with the number of places as a second figure. That is usually good news as well: one change then fixes a lot at once.
| Platform | Shops measured | Average kinds |
|---|---|---|
| CCV Shop | 6 | 4.3 |
| Lightspeed | 24 | 4.2 |
| Magento | 51 | 4.0 |
| WordPress | 6 | 3.5 |
| Shopify | 32 | 3.4 |
| WooCommerce | 25 | 2.6 |
These six platforms together are 144 of the 247 shops we scanned. Please do not read this as a league table: for CCV Shop and WordPress it is six shops each, which is far too few to say anything firm. That is why the count is always shown next to the average. What you see here is spread, not a platform that stands out far enough to draw a conclusion from.
The law
It may well not. That is a serious answer rather than a hedge — the act has an exemption that covers a lot of shops.
Exempt? Then you need nothing from us.
If you fall under the micro-enterprise exemption there is no legal obligation, and we would rather say so now than during a sales call. There can be other reasons to have it checked — visitors dropping out at checkout, customers getting older — but that is a trade-off, not a duty. We are not going to tell you the law demands something of you when it does not.
The measurement
The dullest possible answer, and that is exactly the point: the same tool, the same rules, every time.
The scan runs on axe-core, the open-source engine professional auditors use as well. The same page always produces the same answer. Nothing is estimated and nothing is generated.
Every point in the report comes with the piece of HTML it refers to, plus the WCAG criterion. Your developer or agency can go through it line by line. There is nothing to believe here — only something to look at.
By default you get English developer jargon back. We translate every type of fault into what is broken and who it affects, using a fixed translation table — so that explanation is identical for every shop as well.
Automated testing finds roughly 30 to 40 per cent of all WCAG criteria. Whether the reading order makes sense, whether an alt text is meaningful, whether your site can be operated with a keyboard alone: a person has to judge that.
No scan — ours included — proves that a site complies. What is in the report, though, is really there.
For agencies
If you build or maintain sites for other people, you have this problem not once but thirty times — and usually it is the same fault in the same theme.
Request a scan below and tick the box saying you work at an agency; add roughly how many sites it concerns in the notes.
Free scan
Give us your web address and we will measure one page against WCAG 2.1 AA and send you the report. Free, and there is no sales call attached — you just get the report.
What it costs after that, we honestly do not know yet. We are still working out whether this is a problem people want solved. That is why there are no prices on this site.