WCAG Accessibility Compliance for Multi-Brand E-Commerce Group

Duration6 weeks

Budget$9,000 – $14,000 USD

IndustryE-commerce / Retail

RegionEU

The Challenge

A retail group operating 4 WooCommerce stores under different brands received accessibility complaints from customers and a formal notice about non-compliance with European Accessibility Act requirements. Manual auditing by an external agency had taken 3 weeks per store and cost €4,000+ each time — and by the time the audit report came back, new code deployments had already introduced fresh violations. They needed a system that could continuously monitor all four stores and fix common issues automatically, not just flag them in a PDF once a quarter.

The Solution

Custom WCAG scanning plugin deployed across all 4 WooCommerce stores. Crawls every public-facing page and tests against WCAG 2.1 AA criteria — including dynamically rendered content (AJAX product filters, modal dialogs, accordion FAQs).
Automated remediation engine for the 12 most common violation types: missing alt text on product images (auto-generated from product title + category), insufficient color contrast (CSS override injection), missing form labels, broken heading hierarchy, and ARIA landmark issues.
Compliance dashboard in WP Admin showing per-store violation count, severity breakdown, trend over time, and one-click remediation queue. Exportable PDF reports for legal documentation.
Pre-deploy hook: accessibility scan runs automatically on staging after each code push. Critical violations block production deployment until resolved.

The Result

94% AA complianceUp from 58% average across the four stores at project start

3 weeks → 2 hoursAudit cycle reduced from manual quarterly review to automated continuous monitoring

€16K/year savedEliminated need for external quarterly accessibility audits across 4 stores

The compliance dashboard became a standard part of their weekly operations review. Two months after deployment, the group passed an independent accessibility audit with zero critical violations — the first time in their history. Their marketing team now uses the compliance reports as a competitive differentiator when pitching to accessibility-conscious brands for their marketplace.

Tech Stack

WordPress WooCommerce Custom WCAG Plugin PHP 8 Headless Chrome REST API GitHub Actions

What was unique

Standard accessibility scanners only test static HTML. These WooCommerce stores had AJAX-loaded product filters, dynamically rendered pricing tables, and interactive cart drawers that standard tools completely missed. We built a headless browser crawler that executes JavaScript, clicks through interactive elements, opens modals, and tests the fully rendered DOM against WCAG criteria. The auto-remediation for product images was particularly effective: instead of flagging “missing alt text” on 2,000 product photos and expecting someone to write descriptions manually, the plugin generates descriptive alt text from the product title, category, and key attributes (e.g., “Red leather wallet, men’s accessories, front view”). Accuracy was high enough that editors only needed to review about 5% of generated descriptions.

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