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

Does the EAA apply to my website?

If you sell to consumers in the EU and have ten or more employees or over two million euros turnover, almost certainly yes. E-commerce is explicitly named, as are banking, transport, telecoms and e-books.

Microenterprises — under ten staff and under two million euros — are exempt from the service obligations. That exemption is narrower than it sounds: it covers your obligation, not your client's. If you build sites for companies above the threshold, the requirement lands on them and, commercially, on you.

What does compliance actually require?

The Act sets functional requirements rather than naming a specific standard, but the harmonised European standard EN 301 549 maps onto WCAG 2.2 Level AA, and that is what auditors use in practice.

In concrete terms, most failures come down to the same handful of things:

• Contrast

  Text below 4.5:1 against its background. Light grey on white is the single most common failure, and it is almost always a design decision nobody questioned.

• Keyboard access

  Menus, modals and carousels that cannot be operated without a mouse, or that trap focus once opened.

• Form labels

  Inputs with placeholder text instead of a real label, which screen readers do not announce reliably.

• Alt text

  Images with no alternative text, or decorative images that are not hidden from assistive technology and so get read aloud as noise.

• Heading structure

  Headings chosen for size rather than hierarchy, leaving screen reader users without a usable outline of the page.

What happens if a site is not compliant?

Enforcement sits with each member state, so penalties vary. Complaints can be brought by consumers and by advocacy organisations, and market surveillance authorities can require remediation.

The more immediate cost for most businesses is commercial rather than legal. Public sector procurement across the EU already requires accessibility conformance, and larger private buyers increasingly ask for it in tenders. An inaccessible site quietly disqualifies you from work you never hear about.

Accessibility overlaps heavily with SEO. Proper headings, real labels, alt text and semantic markup are what screen readers need and what crawlers use. Work done for one benefits the other, which makes it unusually good value.

Where should I start?

Run an automated check first — Lighthouse or axe DevTools will find contrast, missing labels and alt text in seconds. That catches perhaps a third of real issues and costs nothing.

Then do the two manual tests that find most of the rest. Unplug your mouse and try to complete your main conversion path using only the keyboard. Then turn on a screen reader and listen to your homepage. Both are uncomfortable, and both are more informative than any report.