Read this first. These are automated findings. Automated checks catch roughly a third of accessibility problems — ours included. A site with zero automated findings can still be unusable with a screen reader, and a site with many findings is not necessarily worse to use. Nothing below says any of these shops broke the law, and nothing below says any of them is accessible.
The numbers
- 9/10shops with at least one violation
- 50pages scanned
- 920elements flagged in total
- 4median issue types per shop
| Shop | Issue types | Elements affected |
|---|---|---|
| Shop A | 7 | 252 |
| Shop B | 7 | 215 |
| Shop C | 5 | 122 |
| Shop D | 3 | 94 |
| Shop E | 10 | 74 |
| Shop F | 4 | 66 |
| Shop G | 4 | 62 |
| Shop H | 3 | 29 |
| Shop I | 2 | 6 |
| Shop J | 0 | 0 |
Issue types and elements measure different things, and the table shows why they disagree. Shop E had the widest spread of distinct problems (ten types) but far fewer affected elements than Shop A, whose seven types repeated across 252 elements — usually one bad component rendered hundreds of times. Neither number alone tells you how hard the site is to use.
One shop came back with nothing
Shop J returned zero findings. We did not assume that — we checked it. Five different real pages were scanned, including a product page, a bouquet page and a delivery page, and every one of them came back empty.
We are publishing that result because it is the uncomfortable one. A scanner that finds something on every site, every week, is easy to sell and quickly becomes noise. If our tool could not come back empty, its findings would mean nothing.
This cuts both ways, and it should: zero automated findings is not proof that Shop J is accessible. It means the checks a machine can run found nothing.
How we ran it
- Ten shops were picked by hand — small and mid-sized European consumer brands, mostly French, one Dutch. Not marketplaces, not enterprises. We checked each domain was live before scanning rather than trusting a list.
- Each site was crawled from its homepage the way a visitor would arrive, following internal links only, and five pages per site were scanned.
- Every page was tested with axe-core, the same free open-source engine that sits underneath most accessibility tools, against WCAG 2.1 AA rules.
- No shop was contacted, before or after. Nothing was submitted to any form. We only requested public pages.
We are not claiming to find more than anyone else. axe-core is free, and anyone can run it. The reason this study exists is that almost nobody runs it twice.
The first run was wrong, and that is the most useful thing here
Our first pass reported almost nothing. Nine of the ten sites looked nearly clean, and one of them — the one that actually had 94 flagged elements — reported zero problems.
That was our bug, not their sites. All ten shops redirect their bare domain somewhere else, and four of them redirect to an entirely different domain. Our crawler compared each link against the address we typed in, decided the site's own pages were external, and stopped after one page. It then reported success. No error was raised.
We only caught it because the results looked implausible and we re-ran one site by hand. The fix makes the crawler follow where the browser actually landed, and every report now states the redirect in plain language. We are describing it here because a scanner that fails silently is worse than one that crashes: it tells you your site is fine.
The same numbers, before and after the fix, are what convinced us to publish this at all. Four months of passing tests had not found it. Touching ten real sites found it in an afternoon.
What this does not show
- It is not a legal finding. None of these shops has been assessed against the European Accessibility Act, and we are not qualified to do that. Automated findings are not a compliance verdict, and we will never present them as one.
- Ten is a small sample. Chosen by hand, not at random, and skewed towards one country. Treat it as a sighting, not a statistic about European retail.
- Five pages is a thin slice. A checkout flow, a filter, or anything behind a login was never seen. Those are usually where the worst problems live.
- An eleventh shop could not be scanned at all. Its bot protection returned 403 to our scanner. It is not in the table, and that is a real limit of this tool, not a detail — some sites we simply cannot check.
Why we do not name the shops
They did not ask to be scanned. Publishing a list of named shops with their problem counts would be pointing at someone else's house, and it would be the last thing we did before nobody trusted us with theirs. The aggregate is the finding; the names add nothing to it.
This applies to the clean shop too. Naming it would be an endorsement we were not asked for, and it would quietly imply the others are bad.
If you want to know what your own site looks like
You can run axe-core yourself for free — a browser extension will give you a single page in about a minute, and we would rather you did that than nothing. What we do is narrower: we run it on the same pages every Monday and tell you what changed since last week.
See how the weekly report works · Read a real report we produced