Plain Access Check

The European Accessibility Act (EAA) has applied to many online shops and services in the EU since 28 June 2025, and the standard behind it is WCAG 2.1 AA. In Germany it’s the BFSG (see below). Fixing what an automated check can find is a first step toward EAA compliance, not the whole of it. Overlay widgets run on top of a page and don’t change its markup, which is what screen readers and auditors read.

Plain Access Check reads your home page and your most recently edited pages, posts and products, and lists the failures that can be found in the markup:

• images without alt text (1.1.1),
• form fields without a label (1.3.1, 4.1.2),
• links and buttons with no accessible name, such as icon links (2.4.4, 4.1.2),
• embedded maps and videos without a title (4.1.2),
• empty headings, skipped heading levels and a missing h1 (1.3.1),
• a missing page language or title (3.1.1, 2.4.2),
• a viewport that blocks zooming (1.4.4),
• duplicate ids (4.1.1).

Each failure comes with where to fix it in WordPress. If an overlay widget is on the page, it’s named.

What it doesn’t check: colour contrast, keyboard access, focus order and captions need a browser and a person, and only a person can judge whether alt text makes sense. Passing these checks doesn’t make a site compliant.

Privacy: the plugin requests your own pages from your own server and reads them. Nothing is sent anywhere, and there’s no tracking. Results are stored in one option, removed when you delete the plugin.

This is an early version, built by Hieu Tran with AI agents. A free web version that checks any site from the outside is at https://opsfixes.com/plainaccess/check/.

A paid add-on, Plain Access Check Pro (https://opsfixes.com/plainaccess/pro/), runs these checks on a schedule, emails you when a page newly fails and keeps a dated history. Nothing in this plugin is locked or needs it.

Germany: Barrierefreiheit and the BFSG

In Germany the European Accessibility Act is implemented by the Barrierefreiheitsstärkungsgesetz (BFSG), which has applied to many online shops and digital services since 28 June 2025. In practice its technical yardstick is WCAG 2.1 AA, through the European standard EN 301 549. Kleinstunternehmen (micro-enterprises) that provide services are exempt.

Barrierefreiheit means more than “accessibility” usually does in English. Under § 3 BFSG, a service is barrierefrei when people with disabilities can find, reach and use it in the usual way, without particular difficulty and, as a rule, without help from others. That’s a result for real people, not a list of passed tests.

Plain Access Check covers only the part of that a machine can find in the markup: the failures listed above. It doesn’t check colour contrast, keyboard use, focus order or captions. It isn’t an audit, and passing its checks doesn’t make a site barrierefrei or confirm conformance with the BFSG.