Since June 2025, an online shop with twelve employees is required by law to be accessible. The same shop with eight employees and less than two million in turnover is not: Law 11/2023, which transposes the European Accessibility Directive into Spanish law, exempts service microenterprises.
For someone trying to buy from either of them with a screen reader, that difference doesn’t exist. The pay button has a name or it doesn’t.
The law decides who can be fined. Your website decides who gets left out. This article is about the second one: why it’s worth making your website usable by everyone, whether anyone forces you to or not.
A meeting that changes the conversation
In the projects we share with TOTHOM, an organisation dedicated exclusively to digital accessibility, there is a meeting that repeats itself. It’s led by a member of their team with a disability, often a blind person. They open the client’s website, in front of the client, and try to do what that website promises: find a service, fill in a form, complete a task.
Nothing needs explaining. The screen reader announces out loud what it finds, and the room hears its own website for the first time. What comes up usually matches what studies measure: links and buttons with no name, images with no description, form fields that don’t say what they ask for.
Until that moment, accessibility was a list of requirements in a document. After that meeting, it’s a person who wanted to complete a task and couldn’t. No report achieves that effect.
Outside that room, the same scene happens without witnesses. Someone who can’t finish the task doesn’t complain or write in: they leave. In your analytics, it’s one more session abandoned at the form.
Many more people than you think
We tend to think of accessibility as a matter of blind people and screen readers. It’s much broader than that.
Five ways of using a website that are rarely taken into account
Each one corresponds to people who want to do the same as everyone else: find information, sign up, buy.
People who navigate with a keyboard, because of an injury, a tremor or reduced mobility, need to reach every link, button and field with the Tab key, and see where they are at all times.
A screen reader reads what the code declares. If a button has no name or an image has no description, for that person they don't exist.
Light grey text on a white background, small type, links distinguished only by colour. It's the most widespread barrier and the cheapest to avoid.
A video with no subtitles or transcript leaves out deaf people, and also anyone watching it on the metro without headphones.
People who process information differently need a clear structure, understandable text and enough time to finish what they started.
In Spain, 4.38 million people report some form of disability, according to the INE’s Survey on Disability, Personal Autonomy and Dependency Situations, with data from 2020. Three in four are 55 or older. Accessibility has a lot to do with age: with your customers a few years from now, and with you.
What’s lost, in numbers
WebAIM, a centre at Utah State University specialising in accessibility, analyses the home pages of the million most visited sites in the world every year. In 2026 it found detectable failures on 95.9%, with an average of 56 errors per page. That’s worse than the year before, after six editions of slow improvement. And it only counts what a machine can detect.
On the consequences, the most useful data point is British and a few years old: the 2019 Click-Away Pound survey, by the consultancy Freeney Williams. It should be read knowing that its authors work in accessibility and that participants signed up on their own initiative. Even so, the proportions are hard to ignore. 69% of shoppers with disabilities abandon a website that puts barriers in their way. 83% only buy from sites they already know they can use. And 8% tell the owner. We don’t know of an equivalent study for Spain.
In business terms, that means that for part of your potential customers your shop doesn’t exist. They buy, but somewhere else. And when they find a website they can use, they go back to it.
There’s an added effect. Many of the good practices that help a screen reader understand a page (structure, headings, alternative text, links with names) also help search engines and AI assistants interpret its content.
Three figures moving in the same direction.
95,9 %
of the most visited home pages in the world have detectable accessibility failures; in 2025 it was 94.8%
WebAIM Million, 2026
56,1
accessibility errors on average per home page; a year earlier it was 51
WebAIM Million, 2026
14 %
more people aged six or over with a disability in Spain in 2020 than in 2008
INE, EDAD 2020
Meeting the standard and being accessible
The WCAG guidelines and the European standard EN 301 549 provide an objective, verifiable framework. Without it there’s no way of knowing where you stand. But the end goal is that someone can complete a task, and a scanner doesn’t check that.
Automated tools are useful during development and to make sure nothing breaks afterwards. Their reach has a ceiling. Deque, the maker of one of the most widely used, estimates that its tool detects 57% of issues by volume. An evaluation by the UK’s Government Digital Service put the best ones between 30% and 40%. The rest requires manual review, technical judgement and testing with people.
We say this from experience. For a while we installed on client websites one of those software layers that promise accessibility by adding a script. An audit by TOTHOM of the web ecosystem of a public body we work with showed that, with the layer in place, the websites still didn’t comply. We stopped using it, told the clients who had it, and moved to what works: manual audit and fixing the code, the design and the content.
From the start or afterwards
A website that is born accessible costs a little more in design, user experience and development. The extra cost is small because the decisions are made only once: contrast in the palette, visible focus in the components, labels in the forms, structure in the templates.
A website that’s already live and doesn’t comply takes a different path. A full audit of pages and content, an issue report, a review of the affected design, fixes to content and documents, development, testing and a new verification. We don’t have a figure we can generalise, so we don’t give one. In our experience, the difference is measured in multiples of what it would have cost to do it right from the start.
Maintaining it isn’t free either. Subtitling video, preparing accessible documents or adapting a platform with years of history has a real cost. In those cases the sensible approach is to prioritise the tasks that the most people need to complete.
And the work doesn’t end with the audit. A website changes every week: a new component, a PDF, a video, an update. Any of them can introduce a barrier that wasn’t there yesterday. That’s why accessibility has to live in the process, in whoever designs, whoever develops and whoever publishes content.
Whoever builds shouldn’t grade themselves
That’s where the way we work with TOTHOM comes from. In the projects we share, they audit and certify. We adapt the design and development and fix what the audit finds. TOTHOM is an inspection body accredited by ENAC in digital accessibility, which gives their reports validity with administrations and third parties. They have also trained our team.
The public body we mentioned is the complete example. Its audit identified the failures. With that report we made the adaptations and fixes across the whole ecosystem, which is now ready to be verified again and certified.
The separation has a reason. If the same team designs, develops and evaluates, the temptation to give itself a pass is strong. We apply the rule to ourselves: our own website is built with these criteria and with what we learned in that training, and we believe it’s accessible. Until someone independent checks it, that’s a belief. That’s why we’re going to ask for it to be audited.
Three questions before calling it done
Three questions, whether the law requires it or not
We order them the way the TOTHOM team does: people, compliance and product.
Can anyone complete the main tasks on your website: find information, fill in a form, sign up, buy, pay? A ten-minute test: put the mouse aside and try to do the most important one using only the keyboard.
Do you know which regulations apply to you and to which websites, apps and documents? If they apply, can you prove you comply through an independent evaluation? And if you don't comply, is there a plan with dates?
Is accessibility part of the design, the components, the development and the publishing of content, or is it fixed when someone complains? Remember that almost nobody complains.
If your answer to the first one is “I don’t know”, you already know where to start.
The law decides who can be fined. Your website decides who gets left out.
Sources
- WebAIM, The WebAIM Million, 2026 — automated analysis of the home pages of the million most visited sites.
- Freeney Williams, The Click-Away Pound Report 2019, 2020 — survey of online shoppers with disabilities in the United Kingdom.
- Instituto Nacional de Estadística, Encuesta de Discapacidad, Autonomía Personal y Situaciones de Dependencia (EDAD), 2022 — people with disabilities in Spain, with data from 2020.
- Deque Systems, The Automated Accessibility Coverage Report, 2021 — coverage of automated testing counted by volume of issues.
- Government Digital Service, audit of automated accessibility tools, cited by The A11Y Project — proportion of issues the tools detect.
- Law 11/2023 of 8 May, BOE — transposition of Directive (EU) 2019/882 on accessibility and exemption of service microenterprises.