Check contrast across the full brand palette, keyboard operability of every journey, heading structure, form error handling, and PDF tagging — those five areas account for most of the accessibility gaps we find on pharmaceutical sites during audit.
Colour contrast across the full brand palette including hover and disabled states, semantic heading hierarchy that follows a logical order, and every interactive element operable without a mouse — these three cover a large share of common failures and are checkable relatively quickly.
Form fields with proper labels and error messages that are announced correctly to assistive technology, and — the gap most sites miss entirely — PDF documents tagged for accessibility rather than assumed compliant because the website around them passes a scan.
This checklist covers what to check informally; a proper audit combines automated scanning with manual keyboard and screen-reader testing against EN 301 549 and WCAG 2.1 AA — see accessibility compliance for that fuller process.
EN 301 549, which points to WCAG 2.1 AA, unless your compliance team specifies otherwise for a particular market, product, or regulatory context you operate under across your affiliates. See what is EN 301 549 for how that standard applies specifically to pharmaceutical websites and where it originally comes from.
See WCAG 2.1 vs 2.2 for how the two versions relate, since most regulatory references still point to the older version while the newer one adds a smaller set of additional success criteria worth knowing about now, even where it is not yet formally required for your specific site or market.
That depends on your company’s specifics, including size, market, and what the site offers to visitors and customers. See does the EAA apply to pharma websites for how to work through that determination rather than assuming it either clearly does or does not apply to you.
PDF tagging, since a document library is frequently assumed compliant because the website around it passes an automated scan. A PDF needs its own accessibility tagging independent of the page linking to it, and it is the gap we see missed most often during a full audit.
Tell us what you have and we will check it against EN 301 549 and WCAG 2.1 AA properly.