pandus-online/online-shops-accessibility-2026

Accessibility of online shops 2026

An automated accessibility check of the home pages of well-known online shops in five countries: Czechia, Germany, Poland, Romania and Ukraine. 417 shops are listed; 289 home pages could be checked. Every page was tested once, on 13 October 2026, against the required success criteria of WCAG 2.2 at levels A and AA.

This is an automated check of one page per shop, not a full audit, and not legal advice. A low score is not a legal judgement about any shop.

• Study with charts and method: https://pandus.online/en/online-shops-accessibility-study-2026
• Rankings by country: https://pandus.online/en/rankings
• Live copy of the data: https://pandus.online/data/online-shops-accessibility-2026.csv
• Archived version with DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23589242

Key numbers (checked home pages only)

Home pages checked	289 of 417 listed
Median score	78 out of 100
At least one text with too little contrast (axe color-contrast, WCAG 1.4.3)	159 pages (55%)
At least one critical problem	103 pages (36%)

Columns

Column	Meaning
country	ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 code: CZ, DE, PL, RO, UA
shop	Shop name as on the editorial list
domain	Domain whose home page was checked
category	fashion, home, electronics, groceries, beauty, books, pharmacy, sport, pets, kids, marketplace, auto
status	checked, or could_not_be_checked when the browser saw a bot check, a country chooser or an error page instead of the home page
score	0–100, empty when not checked (see Method)
critical_rules, serious_rules, moderate_rules, minor_rules	Number of failed axe-core rules of each severity
failing_elements	Number of elements that failed any rule
failed_rules	axe-core rule ids, separated by ;
checked_on	Date of the check (YYYY-MM-DD)
ranking_url	Page of the country ranking

Method

• Selection. In each country, an editorial list of large and well-known online shops from different categories. It is not a traffic ranking and not a random sample. Shops owned by companies from Russia or Belarus are not included.
• Check. Only the home page, in a regular Chromium browser without signing in, with axe-core and the rules of the weekly Pandus check. Only the required WCAG 2.2 A and AA criteria count; AAA criteria and best practices do not.
• Score. From 100, for every failed rule: critical −15, serious −8, moderate −3, minor −1. How often a problem repeats on the page does not change the score.

Limits

• One page per shop. Cart, checkout, filters and account pages were not checked.
• Automated tools find only part of accessibility barriers. They cannot judge whether an image description makes sense or whether an order can be placed with a keyboard.
• The lists differ between countries in size and mix of categories, so countries are not strictly comparable.
• A snapshot of one day. Shops change their pages often.

Corrections

If a result for your shop looks wrong or you have fixed it, write through https://pandus.online/en/contact. We check again for free and update the rankings and the live CSV. Archived versions of this dataset keep the data as of the date of the check.

Licence and citation

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). You may reuse the data, also commercially, with a credit and a link:

Pandus editorial team (2026). Accessibility of online shops 2026: 289 home pages in 5 countries. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23589242