The European Accessibility Act started applying in June 2025. Most business owners still have not checked whether they are subject to it — let alone whether their site passes.

That is understandable. The law is dense, the technical standards sound intimidating, and every guide you find seems to assume you already know what WCAG means. So here is a different approach: five steps, fifteen minutes, using tools that are already on your computer. You will not need to install anything or read any code. By the end you will have a rough score and a clear idea of what to do next.

Grab a coffee. Open your website in Google Chrome. Let’s go.

Step 1: Check if the EAA applies to you (3 minutes)

Before you touch any tools, figure out whether you are even in scope. The EAA applies to businesses that provide products or services to consumers in the EU. That includes online shops, booking platforms, banking apps, e-book services, and most SaaS products with EU users.

Two questions to answer:

Do you have customers or users in any EU member state? If someone in Germany, France, or the Netherlands can purchase from your website, sign up for your service, or access your content, you are in scope. It does not matter where your business is headquartered.

Are you a microenterprise? Businesses with fewer than 10 employees and annual turnover under 2 million euros are exempt from the EAA’s service requirements. Both conditions must be true. If you have 8 employees but earn 3 million euros, you are not exempt. And if you sell physical products covered by the act — consumer electronics, self-service terminals, e-readers — the product requirements apply regardless of size.

If you are clearly exempt, the rest of this guide is still useful. Accessibility improves usability for everyone, and the exemption disappears the moment you hire that tenth person. If you are in scope or unsure, keep going. Our full EAA compliance checklist covers the legal details in depth.

Step 2: Run a Lighthouse accessibility audit (5 minutes)

Chrome has a built-in auditing tool called Lighthouse. You do not need to install anything — it ships with every copy of Chrome.

Here is how to run it:

Open your website’s homepage in Chrome. Right-click anywhere on the page and select “Inspect.” A panel will open on the right side or bottom of your screen. Look for the tab labeled “Lighthouse” at the top of that panel. You might need to click the >> arrows to find it if your screen is narrow.

In the Lighthouse panel, uncheck everything except “Accessibility.” You do not need the performance or SEO audits right now. Under “Device,” leave it on “Desktop.” Click the blue “Analyze page load” button.

Lighthouse will take 10 to 30 seconds to scan your page. When it finishes, you will see a score from 0 to 100 and a list of issues grouped by severity. Write down the score. Then scroll through the list and note the top three issues. Common ones include missing alt text on images, form inputs without labels, and insufficient color contrast.

One important caveat. Lighthouse catches roughly 30 to 40 percent of real accessibility issues. Automated tools are good at flagging things like missing attributes and low contrast ratios. They cannot tell you whether your site actually makes sense to someone who cannot see the screen. That is why the next two steps exist.

Step 3: Tab through your homepage with only your keyboard (3 minutes)

Put your mouse to the side. Click somewhere on the page, then start pressing the Tab key.

Every time you press Tab, the browser should move focus to the next interactive element — a link, a button, a form field. Watch for three things as you go.

First, can you see where you are? There should be a visible outline or highlight around whatever element has focus. If you press Tab and nothing visually changes, that means keyboard users are navigating blind. They have no idea which button they are about to activate.

Second, does the order make sense? Focus should move roughly top-to-bottom, left-to-right, following the visual layout. If it jumps from your footer to a sidebar widget to your header logo, something in the page structure is out of order.

Third, try to complete one real task. Open the navigation menu. Fill out a form. Add something to a cart if you run a shop. If you get stuck at any point — you cannot open a dropdown, you cannot close a popup, you cannot reach the submit button — that is a keyboard trap. Keyboard traps are among the most serious accessibility failures because they literally prevent people from using your site.

Write down anything that felt wrong. For a deeper walkthrough of keyboard testing, our keyboard navigation testing guide covers every scenario you might run into.

Step 4: Turn on your screen reader for 60 seconds (2 minutes)

This is the step most people skip, and it is the most revealing one.

If you are on a Mac, press Cmd + F5 to turn on VoiceOver. A voice will start reading your screen. If you are on Windows, press the Windows key + Enter to start Narrator.

Now close your eyes. Just listen. Navigate to your homepage and hear what the screen reader says.

Does it announce your page title? Does it read your navigation links in a way that makes sense? If you have images, does it describe them or just say “image, image, image”? Can you tell what the page is about from the audio alone?

You do not need to become a screen reader expert. Sixty seconds of listening will tell you more about your site’s real accessibility than an hour of reading documentation. If the experience feels confusing, garbled, or unusable to you after sixty seconds, imagine relying on it as your only way to browse the web.

Press Cmd + F5 (Mac) or Windows key + Enter (Windows) again to turn the screen reader off.

Step 5: Check your score and decide next steps (2 minutes)

You now have three pieces of information: your Lighthouse score, your keyboard testing notes, and your screen reader impression. Here is how to read them together.

Lighthouse score 90 or above, no keyboard issues, screen reader made sense. You are probably in reasonable shape for now. This does not guarantee full EAA compliance — remember, automated tools catch less than half of real issues — but you are not in the danger zone. Keep an eye on things and consider a professional audit when budget allows.

Lighthouse score 70 to 89, or you found one or two keyboard issues. You have specific problems to fix. Look at the top three Lighthouse issues and your keyboard notes. Most of these fixes are straightforward: adding alt text, improving contrast ratios, making sure form fields have labels. Your web developer or website builder’s support team can probably handle them in a few hours. Our five-minute accessibility audit guide breaks down the most common fixes.

Lighthouse score below 70, keyboard traps, or the screen reader experience was unusable. Your site has significant barriers. This is not unusual — the majority of websites on the internet would land here — but it means quick fixes will not be enough. You need a proper accessibility audit from someone who knows what they are doing. That audit will map every issue to specific WCAG criteria and give your team a prioritized remediation plan.

If you are subject to the EAA and your site falls in that third category, treat this as urgent. Enforcement varies by EU member state, but complaints and fines are already happening. The longer you wait, the more expensive the fix becomes.

What this check does not cover

Fifteen minutes with free tools will catch the obvious stuff. It will not catch everything. Some accessibility requirements — like making sure your checkout flow works with assistive technology from start to finish, or verifying that dynamic content updates are announced properly — require deeper testing by someone with experience.

Think of this check as a smoke test. If it passed, great, you are not on fire. If it failed, you know exactly where the smoke is coming from.

Either way, you now know more about your website’s accessibility than you did fifteen minutes ago. That puts you ahead of most business owners who are still pretending the EAA does not exist.

If you want a thorough audit of your site against the EAA’s requirements, our EAA audit service walks through every criterion with you and delivers a plain-language report your team can actually act on.