Website Accessibility: The Overlooked Advantage (and the Legal Reality)

Website accessibility has spent most of the last decade filed under compliance, somewhere between cookie banners and privacy policies, and treated by most firms as a box to be ticked late or not at all. That filing was always wrong, and since the European Accessibility Act began to apply in the summer of 2025, it has become expensive to keep.

The interesting part is not the legislation. It is that the work the law asks for turns out to be almost identical to the work that makes a website clear, fast, and easy to use for everyone who visits it. Firms that did it early rarely describe it afterwards as a compliance project.

What the Law Actually Requires, and Who It Applies To

The European Accessibility Act (Directive 2019/882) has applied across the EU since 28 June 2025. Sweden implemented it through its own act on the accessibility of certain products and services, and the equivalent requirements reach Norway through the EEA alongside rules that already existed in Norwegian law. Public sector bodies have been covered for longer under the earlier Web Accessibility Directive.

Two points get lost in most summaries of it.

The first is scope. The Act is aimed at products and services offered to consumers, which means e-commerce, banking, transport, telecoms, e-books and similar. A consultancy or a law firm whose site is a shop window rather than a shop is often not directly in scope, and microenterprises providing services are exempt outright. Any firm being told it faces immediate fines for a brochure site should ask who is telling them, and why.

The second is direction. Scope has widened at every step for fifteen years, never narrowed, and the technical standard referenced across Europe (EN 301 549, which builds on the WCAG guidelines) is the same standard your clients' procurement teams have started quoting. Whether the law reaches your particular site this year matters far less than the fact that the expectation now exists.

The Pressure That Reaches Firms the Law Does Not

For professional services, the practical pressure rarely arrives as an inspection. It arrives as a question in a tender document.

Public authorities are covered, so their suppliers get asked. Funds and impact organisations report on it, so the firms they hire get asked. Large corporates run accessibility requirements down their supply chains for the same reason they run security questionnaires down them. The question is usually a single line, something close to "describe how your digital assets conform to WCAG 2.1 level AA", and it appears in the section of the form where a weak answer quietly costs points against a competitor who has a strong one.

There is a second audience that never files a complaint or a tender. Someone with low vision reading your case study at eleven at night, on a phone, with the text zoomed. Someone in an open office with the sound off who needs captions. They do not tell you the site was hard work. They just leave, and the analytics record it as a bounce.

Accessibility Is Mostly Just Good Building

Strip out the specialist parts and most of what conformance asks for is unglamorous quality.

Real text instead of text baked into images. Headings used in order, so a page has a structure rather than a set of differently sized fonts. Form fields with labels attached to them. Links that describe where they go instead of saying "read more" four times. Enough contrast between text and background. A visible focus outline so a keyboard user can see where they are. Captions on video. Descriptive alt text on images that carry meaning, and empty alt attributes on the decorative ones.

Each of those helps a search engine understand the page as much as it helps a screen reader, which is why sites tend to perform slightly better after accessibility work rather than worse. The overlap is not a coincidence: both are trying to parse your page without the benefit of your visual design.

Where We Find Problems Most Often

On professional services sites, the same handful of issues account for the bulk of what fails.

Light grey text on white, chosen because it looks restrained, is the most common by a distance. Second is the contact form, where placeholder text stands in for labels and the error message appears in colour alone, so a colour blind visitor is told something is wrong but not what. Third is the PDF, still the default format for reports and case studies in law and finance, and still almost always exported without tags, headings or reading order.

Then there are the small structural ones. Menus that only open on hover, so they cannot be reached from a keyboard. Custom dropdowns and modals built from generic elements with no roles attached, which look fine and are invisible to assistive technology. Videos with automatic captions nobody has corrected, which on Swedish or Norwegian terminology is often worse than no captions at all.

How to Check Before You Hire Anyone

You can learn most of what you need to know about your own site in half an hour, without buying anything.

Put your mouse away and press Tab through your homepage. You should always be able to see where you are, reach every link and button in a sensible order, and open and close the menu and submit the contact form. If focus disappears into an invisible element or gets trapped in a component you cannot escape, you have found a real defect.

Then set your browser zoom to 200 percent and read a service page. Text should reflow rather than requiring you to scroll sideways, and nothing important should be cut off. Run one free automated checker over three or four key pages, but treat the result carefully: those tools reliably catch a useful minority of issues, mostly contrast and missing attributes, and cannot judge whether your alt text is meaningful or your headings make sense. A clean report is a starting point, not a pass.

Finally, look at your most downloaded PDF. If it was exported without tagging, it is almost certainly unreadable to a screen reader, and turning that one document into a web page usually fixes more than a week of smaller corrections.

Where to Start If the List Feels Long

Fix contrast first, because it is one afternoon of work and it affects every page. Fix the contact form second, because that is where the money is. Then commit to building everything new correctly rather than retrofitting the whole archive at once, which is how firms with realistic budgets actually get there.

If your website is being rebuilt in the next year, the entire question becomes cheap: accessibility costs very little when it is part of how a site is built and a great deal when it is bolted on afterwards. That is the argument we make at Filip & Philip whenever a client asks whether to bother now or later. If you want a plain assessment of where your current site stands and what would actually need to change, get in touch.