Accessibility Act: what applies and how AI helps you fix it

The Accessibility Act (2023:254) has applied since 28 June 2025 and is based on the EU accessibility directive. It requires e.g. e-commerce, banking services and e-books to work for everyone, including people who use screen readers, have impaired vision or difficulty with fine motor skills. The supervisory authority is PTS, and the sanctions can be significant.

Does it apply to you?

First the important exemption: micro-enterprises (fewer than 10 employees and under 2 million euros in turnover) are exempt from the service requirements. If you run a small webshop on your own you are therefore probably not obliged under the law. But two reasons to do the work anyway: your larger customers and platforms are starting to require it downstream, and an accessible site is simply a better site, for all visitors and for Google.

The practical benchmark is WCAG 2.1 level AA (via the EU standard EN 301 549).

How to do the job with AI

This used to be a consultant task costing tens of thousands of SEK. Today AI does the heavy lifting:

1. Alt texts for images. Paste product images into an AI chat (Claude or Mistral) and ask for short, descriptive alt texts in Swedish. A hundred product images become an afternoon instead of a week.
2. Plain language. Ask the AI to rewrite your texts more simply: “Rewrite this so it is easy to understand, short sentences, no complicated words.” Understandability is part of accessibility.
3. Subtitles and transcripts. Have videos or podcasts? Klang (Swedish) or Happy Scribe (EU) make subtitles automatically.
4. The code. Building yourself? Ask an AI coding assistant to review your HTML: “Check this against WCAG 2.1 AA: heading structure, contrasts, focus indicators, form labels.” Tools like Lovable give you a decent base, but always explicitly ask for accessibility.
5. Test. AI takes you far but does not replace a real test: tab through the site without a mouse, test with a screen reader, and run a free tool like Lighthouse or WAVE.

Worth knowing

AI does the heavy lifting but sometimes guesses wrong: an alt text can be misleading and an “accessible” colour palette can still have too low contrast. The final check is yours. And if you are formally covered by the law (more than 10 employees): read PTS guidance and document what you have done.

We have been through this ourselves. See our accessibility statement.