A 72-year-old man on holiday in Puerto de la Cruz wants to book a table for Saturday. He opens the restaurant's website on his phone. The light grey text on a white background is barely readable, the "Book" button is tiny and the menu is a scanned PDF. He closes the site and asks his hotel to recommend somewhere else.
Nobody at that restaurant will ever know they lost a table. And chances are their website also fails several points of the standard now used to measure web accessibility, which since 2025 is no longer just good practice.
What is web accessibility and why is it no longer optional?
It means anyone can use your website, including people who don't see well, don't hear well, can't use a mouse or handle their phone with one hand. And it's no longer optional for two reasons: one legal, the other simply about customers.
Customers first. According to the Spanish National Statistics Institute's disability survey, 4.38 million people with some form of disability live in Spain, and 75.4% of them are 55 or older. Accessibility isn't only about blind users: it's about your older customers, people reading without their glasses or someone looking at your site in full sun on the beach.
Did you know? The Canary Islands have one of the highest disability rates in Spain: 115 people per thousand inhabitants aged six or over, according to the same INE survey, against a national average of 94.9.
And the problem is widespread. The annual WebAIM Million study analyses the home pages of the world's top million websites: in 2026, 95.9% had detectable accessibility failures, with an average of 56.1 errors per page. If big websites fail like that, a small business site built on an old template is unlikely to escape.
What does the European Accessibility Act require of a local business?
It requires certain digital services to be accessible from 28 June 2025, and e-commerce is among them. This is Directive (EU) 2019/882, known as the European Accessibility Act, which Spain transposed through Law 11/2023.
What matters most for a local business:
- It covers e-commerce: services provided at a distance, through a website or app, to conclude a contract with a consumer. An online shop, a website where people book and pay, or a ticketing system may fall within it.
- It also covers passenger transport, including websites, apps and e-tickets, and consumer banking.
- Microenterprises providing services are exempt. The directive defines a microenterprise as one with fewer than 10 employees and annual turnover or balance sheet total of up to 2 million euros.
- There are transition periods for some services already being provided, ending no later than 28 June 2030.
Being exempt doesn't mean your website doesn't matter. A hotel in Costa Adeje with 40 staff that takes payment for bookings on its site is very likely affected; a bar in La Laguna with four employees probably isn't, but it still loses customers with a site nobody can read. If you sell or take bookings online and aren't sure whether this applies to you, check with a legal adviser: it's not a call a design agency should make.
What changes with WCAG 2.2, the standard used to measure it?
WCAG are the W3C guidelines used to measure whether a website is accessible, and the current version, WCAG 2.2, adds nine new success criteria. Some of them hit small business websites directly:
- Minimum button size: anything you tap must be at least 24 by 24 pixels, with some exceptions. Goodbye to social media icons the size of a lentil.
- Focus must not be hidden: keyboard users need to see where they are. A cookie banner covering the active button is already a failure.
- Accessible authentication: you can't force people to solve a puzzle or remember a password, with no alternative, to log in or buy.
- Don't ask for the same thing twice: if someone already gave their name and phone in a booking, the next step shouldn't ask again.
Did you know? Since 2025, WCAG 2.2 has also been an ISO standard: according to the W3C, ISO/IEC 40500:2025 is exactly the same as the October 2023 version. And the 2026 version of the European standard EN 301 549, the one used to comply with the law, is already based on WCAG 2.2.
A WCAG 3.0 is under way, but the W3C itself warns in its draft that it still has several years of work ahead. Today, the reference is 2.2.
What are the most common website failures?
Almost always the same six, and none of them is hard to understand. These are the most frequent in the 2026 WebAIM Million, translated into what you'd see at a business on the island:
| Failure | Sites affected | What it looks like at a local business |
|---|---|---|
| Low-contrast text | 83.9% | Light grey text over a beach photo |
| Images without alt text | 53.1% | Photos of dishes or rooms are silent to a screen reader |
| Forms without labels | 51% | The booking form doesn't say what goes in each box |
| Empty links | 46.3% | The Instagram or WhatsApp icon has no name |
| Empty buttons | 30.6% | The menu or send button isn't announced |
| Page language not set | 13.5% | The screen reader reads English with a Spanish pronunciation |
The last one is very Canary Islands: on a multilingual website, if each version doesn't declare its language, a British tourist's screen reader reads your English page with a Spanish accent. We go into more detail in multilingual websites for businesses in the Canaries.
What are phones and browsers already doing on their own?
More and more, and that changes what people expect from your site. In 2025 Google announced that Chrome automatically recognises scanned PDFs so a screen reader can read them, that Android's screen reader uses Gemini to describe images even without alt text, and that Android produces real-time captions for almost any sound on the phone.
Apple, for its part, announced Accessibility Nutrition Labels on the App Store, which show whether an app supports VoiceOver, larger text or sufficient contrast before you download it.
It sounds like good news for businesses, and it is, partly. Your phone trying to fix your website doesn't mean your website is fine: an automatic description doesn't know that photo is your signature dish, and a scanned PDF menu is still awkward to read on a phone even if Chrome manages to read it. If your menu is still a PDF, see how a digital menu designed for mobile works.
Does installing an accessibility widget help?
It doesn't fix the problem, and it can backfire. These are the buttons with a little figure icon that promise to make your site accessible with one line of code.
In January 2025, the US Federal Trade Commission ordered accessiBe to pay one million dollars for claiming its tool could make any website WCAG compliant. The FTC alleged those claims were false, misleading or unsubstantiated. Accessibility is solved in the design and the code, not with a layer on top.
What can you check on your website today?
Two quick tests you can do today, without any software:
- Open your website on a computer and move through it using only the Tab key, without touching the mouse. Can you always see where you are? Can you reach the booking or contact button and press it with Enter? If you get lost, so will a keyboard user.
- Open your website on your phone in full sun, with the brightness down. If any text is hard to read or any button hard to hit, you have a contrast or size problem, exactly the most common failures.
And one extra outside your website: on your Google Business Profile you can state whether the entrance is wheelchair accessible, following Google's guidance (about one metre wide with no steps, or with a ramp). It's information many people filter by before choosing where to go.
If these tests turn up more issues, you'll probably also want to know what happens when your site is slow on mobile: the two often go together.
Reviewing a website's accessibility and bringing it up to WCAG 2.2 is part of what we do in web design. If you'd like us to look at yours, get in touch.