The European Accessibility Act: what it means for your website

The short version: since June 28, 2025, the European Accessibility Act (EAA) requires a wide range of businesses that sell products or services to EU consumers to make those services — including their websites and apps — accessible. It applies to many companies outside the EU too, enforcement is national and already underway, and the technical bar is essentially WCAG 2.1 AA.

What the EAA is

The EAA (Directive (EU) 2019/882) was adopted in 2019 and became applicable on June 28, 2025. Unlike earlier EU accessibility rules that covered only public-sector websites, the EAA targets the private sector. Each EU member state has written it into national law, which means enforcement, complaint channels, and penalties are handled country by country.

Who has to comply

The EAA covers specific product and service categories rather than "all websites." The service categories most relevant to site owners:

• E-commerce — the big one. If consumers in the EU can buy something on your website, the shopping experience is in scope.
• Consumer banking and payment services
• E-books and e-readers
• Passenger transport services (booking, check-in, information)
• Electronic communications and media streaming services

Two points that surprise people:

1. It doesn't matter where your business is based. The EAA follows the consumer, not the company. A US or UK store that ships to EU customers, sells them digital products, or offers them services is providing a service in the EU market.

2. There is a microenterprise exemption — but it's narrow. Service providers with fewer than 10 employees and at most €2 million annual turnover are exempt from the service requirements. Cross either threshold and the exemption is gone. (It also doesn't stop customers from complaining, or from choosing an accessible competitor.)

What your website actually has to do

The EAA's requirements are functional — perceivable, operable, understandable, robust — and in practice they map to the European standard EN 301 549, which for websites points to WCAG 2.1 level AA. Concretely, the failures we find most often on real WordPress sites:

• Images without text descriptions (alt text)
• Text and links with too little color contrast to read
• Buttons and links that announce nothing meaningful to a screen reader
• Forms without labels
• Pages that can't be used with a keyboard alone

Beyond the site itself, service providers are expected to explain how their service meets the requirements — in practice, published accessibility information such as an accessibility statement — and to keep it current.

What happens if you ignore it

Enforcement is national, so it varies: market-surveillance authorities can investigate complaints, order remediation, impose fines (set per country — meaningful four-to-six-figure sums in several member states), and in serious cases restrict the service. The first wave of complaints and enforcement activity began within months of the June 2025 deadline. As with the ADA in the US, the practical driver isn't only regulators — it's complaints from users and pressure from business customers who now ask for accessibility conformance in contracts.

A sensible first response, in order

1. Find out where you stand. Run an automated check of your real pages. It won't catch everything (no automated tool does), but it finds the highest-risk failures in minutes and gives you a baseline.

2. Fix the real problems, in your real code. Alt text, labels, contrast, keyboard access — most of the common failures are mechanically fixable. Avoid overlay widgets: they don't change your site's code, and the FTC fined the largest vendor $1 million over its compliance claims.

3. Publish honest accessibility information. A statement that reflects your actual, current results — including known limitations — is both an EAA expectation and your best-faith evidence.

4. Keep checking. Sites change weekly; compliance is a process. Scheduled re-checks and a dated record of fixes show ongoing effort, which is what regulators and courts respond to.