The 2025 European accessibility law raises the bar for webshops, and voice opens new opportunities

Adding voice to your webshop improves the digital accessibility of your e-commerce environment. Accessible websites rank better in search results and bring customers back. Research also suggests it can win you up to 15 per cent more customers.

On 28 June 2025 the new European Accessibility Act (opens in a new tab) takes effect, in Dutch. It requires every public website, e-commerce businesses included, to be digitally accessible. That matters, because more than a billion people worldwide live with a disability and struggle to take part online. People with low literacy are part of that group too. In the Netherlands alone, that is roughly 2.5 million people.

The aim of digital accessibility is a better experience for people who are deaf or hard of hearing, who have reduced vision, or who live with cognitive, physical or intellectual disabilities. For an e-commerce business the case is easy to make: it widens the market and it improves the experience for everyone else at the same time.

How to measure the accessibility of your website or webshop is set out in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). These guidelines come from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and give web accessibility a common standard. Following them is essential to meeting the new European legislation and the rules that already exist. In short, WCAG names four founding principles: content must be perceivable, operable, understandable and robust.

From the day it applies, digital accessibility is not only a legal requirement. It is also an opening for e-commerce businesses to reach a wider public and raise customer satisfaction. One obvious step is to add a feature that lets shoppers listen to the text of the webshop while they read it. People with low literacy, and others with a reading difficulty, take the information in far better that way. That alone can shorten the path to a purchase.

ReadSpeaker offers a powerful plug-in for exactly this, with a reading voice and a set of supporting features. Our listening tool is already used by thousands of organisations, including 70 per cent of Dutch municipalities, the Belastingdienst (the Dutch tax administration), the UWV (the Dutch employee insurance agency), the newspaper De Telegraaf, and a large number of hospitals and housing associations.

Our sales colleagues will gladly help you put this in place. Contact us for more information.