Framer is a visual website builder popular with designers and creative agencies for building polished, animation-heavy marketing sites. Unlike traditional CMS platforms, Framer generates React-based output from a visual canvas, giving designers direct control over the final site - but no guardrails for accessibility. Under the EAA, Framer sites serving EU consumers must meet EN 301 549 requirements.
Common Framer accessibility issues
Heavily animated pages without reduced motion support
Framer sites frequently rely on scroll-triggered animations, page transitions, and micro-interactions. These animations rarely respect the prefers-reduced-motion media query, creating barriers for users with vestibular disorders and motion sensitivities.
Visual layouts built without semantic HTML
Framer's canvas encourages visual composition - stacking frames, auto-layout containers, and text layers. The resulting HTML is often a deeply nested structure of divs without semantic elements like nav, main, article, or section, making it unintelligible to screen readers.
Text layers used as headings without heading tags
Designers set text size and weight visually in Framer, but these text layers render as generic elements rather than proper h1-h6 heading tags unless explicitly configured. Most Framer sites have broken or non-existent heading hierarchy.
Interactive components lack keyboard support
Framer's component system lets designers build interactive elements like tabs, accordions, and modals using variant transitions. These components often rely on hover and click interactions only, with no keyboard navigation, focus trapping, or ARIA roles.
CMS collection pages without alt text enforcement
Framer's built-in CMS lets designers create collection pages (blogs, portfolios, case studies). The CMS schema doesn't enforce alt text fields for images, meaning every generated page can have missing alternative text.
Link and button elements styled from generic frames
Designers frequently create clickable elements by adding link properties to styled frames rather than using native link or button elements. These produce non-semantic markup that screen readers don't identify as interactive.
How Lumi works with Framer
Lumi scans your published Framer site across all pages including CMS collection pages, testing the React-generated HTML output. Our five engines detect issues in Framer's component markup, animation implementations, and CMS-generated content. Monitor continuously to catch issues introduced by design changes and CMS updates.
Framer-specific WCAG gotchas
Framer has no accessibility checker
The Framer canvas provides no accessibility validation whatsoever. You can publish a site with critical WCAG failures - missing alt text, no heading structure, keyboard-inaccessible navigation - without any warning.
Animations are core to most Framer sites
Animation is deeply integrated into Framer's design philosophy. Removing or reducing animation for accessibility often requires rethinking the entire page design, not just toggling a setting.
Component variants don't map to ARIA states
Framer's variant system (used for hover states, active states, open/closed states) controls visual transitions but doesn't automatically set corresponding ARIA attributes like aria-expanded or aria-selected.
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Frequently asked questions
Can Framer sites be made accessible?
Framer allows adding ARIA attributes and semantic tags through its interface, but it requires deliberate effort from the designer. Most accessibility features need to be manually configured for every element - Framer doesn't guide users toward accessible patterns.
Does the EAA apply to Framer marketing sites?
If your Framer site provides services to EU consumers - including e-commerce, lead generation, or digital content access - the EAA likely applies. Marketing sites that offer commercial services or collect personal data are in scope.
How does Framer compare to Webflow for accessibility?
Both platforms require manual accessibility work, but Webflow provides more direct control over semantic HTML elements and has a larger ecosystem of accessibility resources. Framer's animation-first approach tends to produce more accessibility challenges by default.
Related resources
Last reviewed: April 2026. Content is reviewed quarterly for accuracy.