Compliance with the new European Accessibility Act

[Judx]

The European Accessibility Act mandates that any B2C e-commerce platform placed on the EU market after 28 June 2025 must meet harmonized accessibility requirements based on WCAG 2.1 AA. There is also a five-year transitional period until 28 June 2030 for platforms already live before 2025. It is no good news for smaller e-commerce companies and providers.

Each EU Member State will place fines by national law. Here are some examples:

• Germany: Fines up to €100 000 for non-compliance under the BFSG
• France: First offence €1 500, rising to €3 000 after one year, up to €30 000 for repeat breaches
• Spain: Fines from €30 000 to €600 000 per violation
• Italy: Administrative fines €5 000–€40 000 or up to 5 % of annual turnover

Afaik there is no WCAG-compliant base theme yet. Given the high compliance costs and tightening deadline, has anyone begun developing or forking a theme that ships WCAG 2.1 AA (and prepares for WCAG 2.2 and 3.0 which will soon be required)?

It’s a real headache 😅

[colinmollenhour]

Yikes.

This might not be what some people want to hear (namely merchants free-loading off of OpenMage contributors), but this ridiculous law might be a good opportunity for some OpenMage devs to figure a way to monetize OpenMage a bit... At the very minimum, raising a bounty before putting in all of the work. Weaponizing the EUs overreaching laws is not the way I'd prefer to achieve it, but just hoping for sponsors doesn't work, and it seems OpenMage users have become too accustomed to having a completely free community-supported eCommerce platform. Either it's valuable or it isn't.

Note that the core code is OSL, but the themes are AFL 3.0 so I'm pretty sure there is nothing stopping one from forking and changing the license (I haven't read it in a while but that's what I seem to remember).

I realize this proposal unfairly targets European merchants. That's not the intent, but also the laws passed by the EU are not my fault. Depending on how extensive the updates are it may still be a valuable proposition even for non-EU merchants and chances are some US states will adopt similar laws eventually anyway.