EAA compliance for Astro: WCAG 2.1 AA checklist & fixes

What the EAA actually requires from a Astro site

The European Accessibility Act (Directive 2019/882) applies to consumer-facing online services from 28 June 2025. For a Astro site selling to EU consumers, that means the storefront, checkout, account area, and any embedded payment flow have to meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA via the harmonised standard EN 301 549. Microenterprises with under 10 employees and below €2 million in turnover are exempt for services, but not for products.

Fines vary by member state. Germany caps individual penalties at €100,000; France can fine up to 4% of group turnover; Spain reaches €600,000 for serious or repeated breaches. None of those numbers are theoretical — market surveillance authorities have already started auditing storefronts in Germany and France in the run-up to enforcement.

In practice, the work breaks down into three buckets: theme-level fixes (focus styles, contrast, semantics), interaction-level fixes (carousels, modals, drawers, gallery widgets), and content-level fixes (alt text, headings, descriptive link text). The list below covers the Astro-specific failure points we see most often during scans.

Top WCAG failures we see on Astro sites

Across hundreds of Astro scans, the same handful of issues show up over and over. None of them require ripping the theme apart — most are fixable in a few hours by someone comfortable in the platform's editor or template files.

• Islands hydrating after assistive tech has already read the page

  Interactive controls inside an island can have stale aria-state until hydration finishes.

  4.1.2, 4.1.3 — Level A/AA

• View Transitions without focus management

  Astro's SPA-style navigation needs explicit focus-on-route-change handling.

  2.4.3 — Level A

Concrete code fixes for Astro

Below are copy-paste fixes for the most common Astro issues. They assume you have access to your theme code or the platform's custom-code injection panel. If you cannot edit code directly, share these snippets with whoever maintains the site — every one of them is a ten-minute change.

<script>
document.addEventListener('astro:page-load', () => {
  const main = document.querySelector('main');
  if (main instanceof HTMLElement) {
    main.setAttribute('tabindex', '-1');
    main.focus();
  }
});
</script>

Tools and plugins worth installing first

• Astro a11y integration

• eslint-plugin-jsx-a11y for islands written in React/Vue

How to scan a Astro site without missing anything

Automated scanners catch about 30–40% of WCAG issues; the rest need manual review. The good news is that the 30–40% includes the most expensive issues to remediate after the fact, so an automated scan is the cheapest way to get unstuck. Run one before you change a line of theme code.

• Scan after a hard reload; islands behave differently on first vs second navigation.

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