The European Accessibility Act is in force. What it means for your website.

The European Accessibility Act's compliance deadline was 28 June 2025. It has been enforceable for over a year, and a great many businesses selling into the EU still have no idea whether it applies to them.

This is not legal advice — get that from someone qualified in your jurisdiction. It is a practical summary of what the requirement means in engineering terms.

Who it applies to

The Act covers a defined set of products and services sold to consumers in the EU, including e-commerce, consumer banking, e-books, transport services and telecommunications.

It applies based on where your customers are, not where your company is. A business outside the EU selling to EU consumers is in scope. There are exemptions, notably for microenterprises providing services, and the details vary by member state because each one implements it in national law.

What compliance actually means

In practice, conformance with WCAG 2.1 Level AA, via the European standard EN 301 549. WCAG 2.2 AA is a safer target — it is a superset and it is where the standards are heading.

That is not a vague aspiration. It is a specific, testable list of success criteria.

What automated testing catches

Roughly a third of it, and that third is worth having because it is cheap to find and cheap to fix:

• Images without alternative text.
• Insufficient colour contrast between text and its background.
• Form inputs with no associated label.
• Missing page language declarations.
• Viewport settings that block pinch-to-zoom.

Our accessibility checker runs the same axe-core rules Google Lighthouse uses and reports which WCAG criterion each failure maps to, so the result is something you can hand to a developer or a lawyer.

What it does not catch

The other two thirds, and this is the part that matters:

• Whether alt text is meaningful or just present.
• Whether a keyboard user can complete checkout, or gets trapped in a modal.
• Whether error messages explain what went wrong.
• Whether the reading order makes sense to a screen reader.
• Whether a video has captions that are accurate rather than auto-generated nonsense.

A clean automated score is necessary and not sufficient. Anyone selling you an overlay widget that promises compliance in one line of JavaScript is selling something that does not work and has itself been the subject of litigation.

Where to start

1. Establish whether you are in scope. This is a legal question and worth an hour of a professional's time.
2. Run an automated scan to find the cheap wins, and fix those first.
3. Audit your critical journeys by hand — sign-up, checkout, contact — with a keyboard and a screen reader.
4. Fix what you find, then build accessibility into how you ship rather than treating it as a project that ends.

The part that is not about compliance

Around one in six people has a disability, and roughly one in twelve men has some form of colour vision deficiency. An inaccessible checkout does not just create legal exposure; it turns away customers who were trying to give you money.

The legal requirement is the deadline. The commercial argument is the reason.

Does the European Accessibility Act apply to my business?

It applies based on where your customers are rather than where your company is, so a business outside the EU selling to EU consumers is in scope. It covers a defined set of products and services including e-commerce, consumer banking, e-books and transport. There are exemptions, notably for microenterprises providing services, and details vary by member state because each implements it in national law.

What standard do I need to meet for the EAA?

In practice, conformance with WCAG 2.1 Level AA via the European standard EN 301 549. WCAG 2.2 AA is the safer target because it is a superset and it is where the standards are heading. That is not a vague aspiration — it is a specific, testable list of success criteria.