What the European Accessibility Act means for a webshop in Finland
The European Accessibility Act reached Finnish webshops through the Act on the Provision of Digital Services, the law people here call the digipalvelulaki. In practice it asks for one thing. Your online store has to work for someone who navigates with a keyboard, listens to a screen reader, zooms the text to double size or uses a phone with the contrast turned up.
Traficom, the authority that enforces accessibility in Finland, states on saavutettavuusvaatimukset.fi that the new accessibility requirements for digital services apply from 28 June 2025 (checked 20 September 2026). The same site lists online stores among the private sector services that came into scope on that date.
It is a change of category. Accessibility law in Finland used to be a public sector matter. A city website had to comply and a shoe shop did not. Now a shoe shop that sells online can sit inside the same rules.
Who it applies to from 28 June 2025
It applies to businesses selling goods or services to consumers at a distance through an online store, alongside five other kinds of service. The list published on saavutettavuusvaatimukset.fi covers online stores, e-books, passenger transport services, consumer banking services, access to audiovisual content services and consumer messaging services.
The test is the service, not the industry. A machine shop in Seinäjoki that sells only through quotations and invoices is not running a consumer webshop. The same machine shop with a spare parts store where a private person can add an item to a basket and pay is doing exactly that.
Business to business selling sits outside the consumer definition, but the mixed case catches people. Plenty of Finnish stores sell to trade customers and consumers from one catalogue. If a private person can complete a purchase, treat the store as in scope.
The micro enterprise exemption
Micro enterprises providing services are excluded. saavutettavuusvaatimukset.fi defines a micro enterprise as a business with fewer than 10 employees and an annual turnover of at most 2 million euros, or an annual balance sheet total of at most 2 million euros.
Read the two thresholds together. Headcount is the first gate. A company with twelve people on the payroll is not a micro enterprise even if the turnover is small.
The exemption also moves under you. A store that hires its tenth and eleventh person during a good year has left the exemption behind, and nobody sends a letter to say so. That belongs in your annual planning rather than in a surprise.
Why the exemption is a weak place to stand
Because it protects you from the law and not from the customer. Finland has an ageing population and a high rate of online buying among people over sixty. A checkout that cannot be completed with a keyboard loses those orders whether or not anyone is allowed to fine you for it.
There is a commercial reason too. Larger buyers now ask about accessibility in tender documents, and public sector buyers ask as a matter of routine. A supplier with no answer gets filtered out early and never finds out why.
The position we take with clients is short. Build to the requirements, claim the exemption if you qualify, and never use the exemption as a reason to skip the work.
What WCAG asks in practice
Finnish law points at WCAG 2.1 levels A and AA. saavutettavuusvaatimukset.fi counts 49 statutory success criteria and names one exception, criterion 1.2.4 on captions for live video, which falls outside the requirements of the act. Level AAA criteria are not required.
Forty nine criteria sounds like a six month project. Most of them are already satisfied by any site built with plain, correct HTML, which is why a simple site often passes and an elaborate one does not.
The shortest useful summary for a shop owner is this. Everything must be reachable with a keyboard, everything must be readable without good eyesight, every image and icon must carry a text meaning, and every error must say what went wrong in words.
The four failures we find in almost every store
Contrast comes first. Light grey text on white looks refined in a design mockup and fails the 4.5 to 1 ratio that level AA asks for body text. Prices, delivery notes and form labels are the usual victims.
Second, the missing focus ring. Someone removed the browser outline because it looked untidy, and now a keyboard user has no idea where they are on the page.
Third, form fields with a placeholder instead of a label. The grey word inside the box vanishes the moment the customer types, and a screen reader often has nothing left to announce.
Fourth, images that carry information with an empty alt attribute. A size chart saved as a picture is unreadable to a screen reader, and a product photo with the model name burned into it is a product name nobody can hear.
The accessibility statement nobody writes
A statement is required, and almost no Finnish webshop has one. saavutettavuusvaatimukset.fi sets out what an online store statement has to contain, among other things a general description of the service, what products are needed to use it, how the service meets the requirements that apply specifically to it, and how its accessibility features work with assistive technology.
Write it honestly. A statement claiming full conformance while three unreadable PDFs sit on the product pages is worse than a statement that lists those three PDFs with a date for fixing them.
Put it in the footer next to the privacy policy, give it a real URL of its own, and include an address where someone can report a problem and get an answer.
Telling customers about the products you sell
Online stores carry one duty beyond making the site usable. saavutettavuusvaatimukset.fi states that an online store has to provide information about the accessibility of the products and services it sells, where the manufacturer or importer has supplied that information.
For most shops this is a passthrough job rather than research. If a supplier sends an accessibility datasheet for a device, that information belongs on the product page and not in a folder on somebody's laptop.
It is also a quiet sales advantage. A customer looking for a kettle that a person with limited grip can lift will buy from the store that answers the question on the page.
How to check your own store
Start with an automated scan, then stop trusting it. Free tools such as the WAVE browser extension or the accessibility audit built into Chrome will find contrast failures, missing alt attributes and unlabelled fields in about a minute per page.
Automated tools catch a minority of real problems. They cannot tell you whether the alt text on a photo is useful, or whether your checkout makes sense read aloud. The rest is manual, and not difficult.
Check five pages rather than all of them. The front page, a category page, a product page, the basket and the checkout. If those five work, the long tail usually works too, because they share the same templates.
The keyboard test that takes ten minutes
Put the mouse away and press Tab. Start at the top of your front page and try to buy something using only Tab, Shift and Tab, Enter and the arrow keys.
Three things go wrong at this point in most stores. Focus disappears into a menu you cannot see, a cookie banner traps you and refuses to release, or the add to basket control turns out to be a styled div that Tab skips entirely.
If you reach the order confirmation without touching the mouse, your store has cleared the highest hurdle in WCAG. Most of what remains is cosmetic.
What a screen reader hears on your product page
Turn on the reader you already own. Windows ships with Narrator and macOS with VoiceOver, and both take five minutes to learn well enough to run a test.
Listen to one product page from the top. You want to hear the product name, a price read as a price, a size selector that announces which size is selected, and a control that says add to basket rather than the word button on its own.
The moment you hear image, image, image, or link, link, link, you have found the work. Write down what you heard. That list is the brief.
What this costs, and where the cost really sits
The cost depends almost entirely on how the store was built, which is why nobody can guess it from the outside. A site with clean HTML, real buttons and a sensible palette needs adjustments. A site assembled from a page builder with nested widgets and hard coded colours can need the templates rebuilt.
The things that push the price up are a long list of custom interactive components, video that has to be captioned, PDFs used as product documentation, and brand colours that fail contrast and therefore have to be renegotiated with whoever owns the brand.
The things that keep it down are a small number of page templates, a component library you already control, and doing the work inside a redesign that was going to happen anyway. If you want a specific answer for your own store rather than a general one, a free review of your website is the fastest route to it.
Who enforces it, and what happens if you ignore it
Traficom enforces accessibility in Finland and takes reports from the public through its digital accessibility customer service. A report from a frustrated customer is the most likely way you will learn that your store has a problem.
The realistic sequence is a report, a request for an explanation, and an instruction to fix the problem within a stated period. A penalty does not arrive out of nowhere on a Tuesday morning.
The reason to act sits closer to home than the regulator. Fixing this after a complaint costs more than fixing it on your own schedule, and it happens in public rather than in private.
A sensible order to do the work in
Fix the checkout first. It is the page where a failure costs money on the same day, and it is the page any complaint is most likely to name.
Then contrast across the whole site, because it is one change to a stylesheet and it repairs hundreds of pages at once. Then focus styles, then form labels, then alt text, working through the catalogue in order of what actually sells.
Write the accessibility statement last, when it can be true. If you are rebuilding anyway, fold all of this into the build instead of treating it as a separate project, and go through the consumer rules every Finnish webshop has to follow in the same pass, because the two audits overlap more than anyone expects. In the stores we build and host, this work lives inside the online store on your own server rather than beside it.