Website Accessibility Rules Every Cyprus Business Faces

If your business sells anything online to customers in the EU, there is a set of accessibility rules you are now expected to meet. The European Accessibility Act has been in force since June 2025, and it applies in Cyprus like everywhere else in the union. Plenty of local business owners still have not heard of it.

This is not a scare piece. Most of what the rules ask for is the kind of thing that makes a website better for everyone — clearer text, forms that work, buttons you can actually find. Here is what it means in plain terms.

What the rules actually ask for

The European Accessibility Act sets out that certain products and services sold to consumers must be usable by people with disabilities. For websites, that mostly means people who are blind or have low vision, people who are deaf or hard of hearing, people with limited motor control, and people with cognitive differences.

The technical benchmark is a European standard called EN 301 549, which in turn points to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines — WCAG — at level AA. You do not need to memorise any of that. What matters is the practical outcome: someone using a screen reader, a keyboard instead of a mouse, or a phone at maximum text size should still be able to browse, understand, and buy.

Does this apply to your Cyprus business?

The Act targets consumer-facing services. E-commerce is explicitly named, as are banking, transport ticketing, telecoms, and e-books. So if you run an online shop, sell tickets, or take bookings and payments through your site, you are in scope.

There is an exemption for microenterprises — broadly, businesses with fewer than ten staff and under two million euro in annual turnover — when it comes to providing services. That covers a lot of Cypriot companies. But two cautions. First, the exemption is narrower than people assume and does not extend to everything. Second, "we are legally exempt" is a poor reason to keep a site that a portion of your customers cannot use. If you are unsure where you sit, that is a conversation worth having with a lawyer rather than guessing from a blog post.

Seven fixes that cover most of the ground

• Add alt text to images. A short description of what the image shows. Screen readers read it aloud. Decorative images can be marked as such and skipped.
• Fix your colour contrast. Light grey text on a white background is the single most common failure. Body text needs a contrast ratio of at least 4.5 to 1 against its background.
• Label every form field. A visible label above the field, properly connected to it in the code. Placeholder text that vanishes when you start typing does not count.
• Make everything keyboard-reachable. Unplug your mouse and press Tab through your own site. If you cannot reach the menu, the search box, or the checkout button, neither can a chunk of your visitors.
• Show a visible focus outline. When someone tabs to a link, it should be obvious where they are. Many themes deliberately remove this — put it back.
• Caption your videos. Anything with speech needs captions. This also helps the large share of people who watch with the sound off.
• Use real headings in order. One main heading per page, then sub-headings beneath it. Headings are how screen reader users skim a page, and they help search engines too.

How to check your own site in an afternoon

Start with a free automated tool. WAVE and Google Lighthouse both run in your browser and will flag missing alt text, contrast problems, and unlabelled fields in seconds. They typically catch around a third of real issues, so treat the result as a starting list rather than a clean bill of health.

Then do the manual pass, which matters more. Tab through your homepage and your checkout with the keyboard alone. Zoom the browser to 200 percent and see whether the layout survives. Turn on the screen reader that is already built into your phone and try to complete a purchase. That last exercise is uncomfortable the first time, and it will teach you more than any report.

The part that is not about compliance

Roughly one in six people worldwide lives with a significant disability, and the figure rises sharply with age. Cyprus has an ageing population and a large share of older visitors and residents. Every accessibility barrier on your site is a customer who quietly leaves and buys somewhere else.

The overlap with everything else you care about is substantial, too. Proper headings, descriptive links, captions, and clean form markup all help search engines read your site. Faster, simpler pages convert better. Accessibility work rarely sits in its own budget line for long — it tends to pay for itself through the same metrics you were already watching.

Where to start

Run Lighthouse on your three most important pages: homepage, main service or product page, and checkout. Fix contrast and alt text first, because they are cheap and high-impact. Then book time with whoever maintains your site to work through keyboard access and form labels.

If you would like a second pair of eyes on where your site stands, we are happy to take a look.