The 5 Most Common EAA Violations I Found Auditing 14 Production Sites (And How to Fix Each One)

I spent the last three months auditing 14 production websites for European Accessibility Act compliance. Some were e-commerce stores, a few were SaaS dashboards, and a couple were content-heavy marketing sites. The codebases ranged from hand-rolled HTML to Next.js to WordPress with a dozen plugins stacked on top. Here's what surprised me: the same five violations showed up on nearly every single site. Not obscure edge cases. Basic stuff. The kind of problems that affect real users every day and that take 15 minutes to fix once you know what to look for. 1. Missing or meaningless alt text on images This one topped the list on 13 out of 14 sites. And it wasn't just missing alt attributes -- it was alt text that said things like "image1.png" or "Screenshot 2024-03-15" or just "photo." Screen readers announce these verbatim. Imagine navigating a product page and hearing "image slash products slash DSC underscore 4782 dot jpeg" repeated six times. That's the experience you're delivering. Th