ShopOffen
A free, automated accessibility check for online shops under the European Accessibility Act
(Directive (EU) 2019/882). This is the scanner and report generator behind
shopoffen.peculiar.systems — use the hosted version,
or run it yourself.
It opens a shop's home, category, product and cart pages in headless Chromium, runs
axe-core against WCAG 2.1 AA / EN 301 549, and adds a few
checks axe does not do:
- Reflow — does the page work at 320 px without horizontal scrolling?
- Keyboard — a Tab walk through the home page: is focus visible, are there hidden stops or traps?
- Screen reader — does the product page expose a heading, a price and a named buy button?
- Listen — how many things a screen reader reads before the buy button, and how many of them are just "image" or "button" with no name. The report can read the start of the page aloud with the browser's own speech.
- Accessibility information — is it linked from the home page, and does it offer a way to report barriers?
The report is written for the shop owner, not the developer: what already works first, then
what to fix, each finding with the page, the element and how to fix it — plus a template for
the accessibility information the EAA asks for (Annex V).
Languages and national law
Reports come in the shop's own language. Each names the country's own transposition act,
supervisory authority and penalties, checked in the national gazettes:
en de (+ at) fr (+ be) it es nl (+ be) pl pt cs sv da fi ro hu el (+ cy)
The legal data is also published as a dataset with sources — act, authority, penalties, where to
publish the accessibility information, microenterprise exemption — for all 27 EU member states in
data/eaa-national-laws/ (JSON and CSV).
Run it
Needs Node.js 18+ and Python 3.9+ (standard library only).
cd scanner && npm install && cd ..
node scanner/scan.js --lang de https://shop.example.de # → scanner/out/scan-<host>-<date>.json
python3 report.py scanner/out/scan-shop.example.de-2026-09-25.json --lang de # → out/Bericht-<host>-<date>.html
--lang picks the report language (default de for report.py, en for the scanner).--country at|be|cy picks another country's law inside a language; by default it follows the shop's top-level domain.- Page discovery is heuristic. Pass paths explicitly if it picks the wrong pages:
node scanner/scan.js https://shop.example /collections/all /products/x /cart
The scanner only follows public addresses: every request the browser makes is checked, and
anything that resolves to a private, loopback or link-local address is aborted.
What it is not
An automated check finds only part of what a manual audit would. A clean report is a good
first pass, not a certificate of conformity and not legal advice. The report says so, and
it recommends against accessibility overlays (see the
European Disability Forum's statement).
Adding a language
A language is data, not code: i18n/<lang>.json (same keys as en.json, with a legal block
per country) and templates/statement-<lang>.md. For languages axe-core has no locale for,
add rule_titles to the JSON so finding titles are translated too. Please cite the primary
source for every legal statement.
Licence
Code (scanner/, report.py, build.py): MIT. Report texts, templates and data (i18n/,
templates/, data/): CC BY 4.0. See LICENSE and LICENSE-CONTENT.
Made by Peculiar Systems, an independent software studio.
