OpenAisle — Accessibility & EAA Compliance for WooCommerce

OpenAisle scans your WooCommerce store for accessibility barriers and turns the results into a clear compliance score, a prioritised issue list, and a timestamped audit trail — all on your own server. Scanning runs entirely on-site using a bundled copy of the open-source axe-core engine. Scans run in hidden, same-origin iframes of your own store pages; a small bundled scan agent runs axe-core in-page and reports the results back locally — no external content is loaded and nothing leaves your server. Why accessibility matters for WooCommerce The European Accessibility Act (EAA) applies from 28 June 2025 and requires many businesses selling to EU consumers — including e-commerce — to make their digital services accessible, using EN 301 549 (which references WCAG 2.1 level AA). In the United States, the ADA has long been the basis for a large volume of website accessibility complaints against online retailers. Beyond the law, roughly one in four adults lives with a disability, so an inaccessible checkout is lost revenue. OpenAisle helps you find and understand these barriers. It does not provide legal advice, and no tool can promise you will avoid a complaint — but a documented, improving accessibility program is a reasonable, good-faith response. What it scans

• Your key WooCommerce flow pages — shop, a sample product, cart, checkout, and my-account.
• Real, rendered pages (including content added by JavaScript), so it catches issues a source-only checker misses, such as colour contrast and ARIA problems.
• Every finding is mapped to a plain-language explanation, a WCAG criterion, the WooCommerce flow it affects, and whether it is in EAA / EN 301 549 scope.

Free features

• On-server accessibility scan of your key store flows.
• Compliance score (0–100) and dashboard with a WooCommerce flow breakdown.
• Severity-grouped issue list with WCAG badges, an EAA-relevance filter, and free how-to-fix guidance.
• Catalog alt-text audit — see, across your whole product catalog, how many images are missing alt text.
• A basic accessibility statement template.
• An audit trail of scans and changes you can keep as a record of your efforts.

Pro features OpenAisle Pro (a separate paid upgrade) adds:

• AI-generated image alt text for your product photos, using your own OpenAI or Google Gemini API key (you bring the key; the free plugin never contacts these services).
• Scheduled accessibility checks with email re-scan reminders (a full WCAG scan runs in your browser; scheduled checks run on your server and tell you when it is time to re-scan).
• Downloadable PDF compliance reports.
• An auto-customised accessibility statement and deeper WooCommerce-flow checks.

1. Upload the plugin to your /wp-content/plugins/ directory, or install it from your WordPress dashboard.
2. Activate the plugin through the "Plugins" menu in WordPress.
3. Open the "OpenAisle" menu, follow the short setup, and run your first scan.

Requires WooCommerce 8.0 or newer and PHP 7.4 or newer.

1.0.1

• New: gentle one-time review request after your second scan (dismissible, never nags).
• Fix: hardened REST/AJAX capability checks for page and media actions.
• Fix: bulk alt-text generation limit now enforced server-side at 50.

1.0.0

• Initial release.