Below are the key steps to help you ensure your website and law firm are ready for The European Accessibility Act (EAA). While not an exhaustive list, these are the main phases for ensuring Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) conformance.
1. Determine your target WCAG version and conformance level
The EAA requires you to meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA but will be updated in 2026 to version 2.2. Choose which version and level you are aiming to conform to help build a clear list of fixes that need to be made. For more information, have a read of our blog post on understanding the guidelines.
2. Identify the key user journeys on your site, such as enquiry forms, contact pages and payment portals
While it is always worth striving to make your website as accessible as possible, it may not be feasible for every page on a large website to be free of all possible roadblocks. Identifying the key areas of your website is a great starting point for focusing your efforts.
These can be identified from Google Analytics data, or by picking out the most complicated areas of your site e.g. a complex form will likely have more potential for accessibility pitfalls than a plain page of text.
3. Perform an audit
This can be automated using tools such as Accessibility Checker to identify common issues or you can manually perform an audit.
Some quick manual checks that can be done are:
- Making sure the whole site is navigable by keyboard (i.e. press tab on your keyboard to move through your website)
- Check the colour contrast meets WCAG 2.1 using a colour contrast checker
- Try zooming in on your site in the browser to 200% and see if it is still usable
4. Sort issues by severity and frequency
Focus first on fixes that affect the widest range of users e.g., missing focus outlines, extremely low colour contrast, or inaccessible navigation. Many automated tools will rank issues on their severity and give you a comprehensive list as a starting point to make fixes from.
5. Assign responsibilities and timelines
Ensure your design team, web developers, and content editors know what changes are needed and by when.
6. Implement the fixes and test again
Update design elements, coding and content, and then run your tests again. This will ensure any issues have been resolved.
7. Document and certify your efforts
Keep record of any audits, test results and fixes to help demonstrate diligence in the event of legal issues.
Make sure you have an up-to-date accessibility statement on your website. This should summarise your conformance level, any limits to the scope of your accessibility efforts, and any planned improvements.
8. Ongoing maintenance and monitoring
The EAA requires continuous monitoring of accessibility within an organisation. Depending on how frequently you update your website, you may want to schedule audits at regular intervals to ensure you keep on top of any errors that arise for your law firm.
Any updates to the content and code of your website can introduce new accessibility roadblocks. Major updates to your site are also a key time to run another in depth accessibility audit.
Accessibility guidelines are continuously evolving, so it is important to keep up to date with the latest advice.
9. Training
Ensuring accessibility of your products and service is the responsibility of everyone in your team, from designers and developers, to CEOs and decision makers. Make sure your team members are trained in accessibility guidelines so they do not unknowingly introduce roadblocks for people using your website.
If you’d like to discuss WCAG for your law firm, please get in contact with one of the team at Conscious on sales@conscious.co.uk.