The European Accessibility Act kicked in. Most of my clients' sites would fail.

June 28, 2025 was the deadline for the European Accessibility Act. Websites serving EU customers must comply with WCAG 2.1 AA or face fines.

I run a tool that monitors 30+ client sites for a web agency. Out of curiosity, I ran an accessibility scan on all of them last month.

Results:

• 22 out of 30 had critical or high risk violations

• Most common: missing alt text on images, no lang attribute on <html>, form inputs with no labels

• Average risk score: 67/100

None of these clients knew. And honestly — neither did the agency.

The violations aren't hard to fix. Missing lang="en" on the HTML tag is one line. alt="" on decorative images takes 30 seconds. But finding them across 30 sites manually? That's a full day of auditing.

What surprised me most was the legal exposure breakdown. For EU-based clients, the EAA applies. For US clients with a physical location, ADA Title III case law has been expanding to cover websites since 2019. Several clients had both jurisdictions apply.

We added automated WCAG 2.1 AA scanning to SiteBrief (sitebrief.net). It runs axe-core on each site and gives you:

• A risk score (0–100)

• AI summary of what's actually broken and why it matters legally

• Priority fix list, not just a raw list of violations

And for DevLab users — it opens a GitHub PR with the fix for the most common ones automatically.

If you're running a web agency and haven't audited your clients' accessibility yet, now is the time. The fines are real and the fixes are mostly trivial.

Happy to share the scan results format if anyone's interested.