With the European Accessibility Act (EAA) fully in effect as of June 28, 2025, WooCommerce has been working diligently with our partners to reinvigorate our standards for accessibility.
The EAA deadline has provided an excellent milestone to resolve accessibility issues across the WooCommerce Core plugin, helping us progress toward WCAG 2.2 conformance. We have successfully established a baseline accessibility standard for merchants, developers, and shoppers—touching multiple aspects of both the user and product experience.
Accessibility is always a win for usability and enhances every level of the user experience. Accessible shopping experiences that incorporate screen readers, keyboard navigation, visual cues, and assistive technology immediately expand a merchant’s customer base while giving developers a strong foundation to build upon with consistency.
Over the past year, WooCommerce Core developers collaborated with Equalize Digital and the agencies Fueled and 10up to deliver a comprehensive set of more than 140 accessibility enhancements across the platform. These updates significantly advance WooCommerce toward WCAG 2.2 Level AA conformance, with some areas even meeting AAA standards.
Key Focus Areas
The work spans multiple accessibility domains:
- Screen Reader Support: Ensuring accurate ARIA labels, semantic markup, and descriptive element names across modals, buttons, forms, and dynamic content.
- Keyboard Navigation & Focus Management: Correcting keyboard traps, ensuring proper tab order, and managing focus within interactive components like modals and carts.
- Color Contrast & Visual Presentation: Aligning UI elements with WCAG 2.2 AA color contrast requirements for text, icons, and state indicators across product pages, checkout, and account areas.
- Form Semantics & Error Handling: Fully labeling form fields, associating instructions and errors programmatically, and improving feedback for screen readers.
- Heading Structure & Landmarks: Correcting heading levels, improving page landmarks, and ensuring a logical reading order for assistive technologies.
- Dynamic Status Messaging: Implementing live region announcements for cart updates, product variations, and checkout interactions.
Notable Improvements
Among the more than 140 changes delivered, several high-impact updates stand out:
- Fully accessible modals: focus is correctly trapped, returned, and announced to assistive technologies.
- Comprehensive form labeling across checkout, login, and account management screens.
- Live status announcements for key cart and checkout interactions.
- Consistent ARIA roles for tabs, accordions, and filter components.
- Resolution of ambiguous and missing button labels.
- Structural heading fixes across Product, Checkout, My Account, and Mini Cart templates.
- Correction of multiple WCAG 2.2 AA color contrast violations across global components.
- Improved keyboard operability across complex components like Product Filters, Reviews, and Mini Cart.
Statements and Documentation
The WooCommerce team has been hard at work reviewing, updating, consolidating, and connecting our accessibility standards and best practices for everyone—from merchants to builders and developers.
We recently launched a brand-new landing page that details how to report issues, outlines our accessibility statement and ongoing commitment to accessibility as a standard of operation, shares the latest Accessibility Conformance Report for the WooCommerce Core plugin, as well as ACRs for multiple extensions. and links to best practices for extension and third-party developers in our developer documentation.
We’ve also hosted live events to help you anticipate and prepare for your store development needs, and interviewed leaders in the WordPress accessibility community.
As we continue to make improvements, we encourage you to report and create issues using our Accessibility label.
And of course, partner with us to foster a culture of accessibility throughout WordPress—and join us for WP Accessibility Day, a live-streamed online event open to everyone.
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