The European Accessibility Act is in force. Your site may be breaking it.

On 28 June 2025, a rule that had been coming for years finally landed: the European Accessibility Act became enforceable across all 27 EU member states. For a lot of online businesses, accessibility stopped being a nice-to-have and became a legal obligation — the kind with regulators and penalties attached.

If your checkout can't be completed with a keyboard, or your product images have no text for a screen reader, that's no longer just lost customers. In the EU, it's now a compliance exposure. Here's the plain version of what changed.

(One note before I start: I'm a security specialist, not a lawyer, and this is background — not legal advice. For how the Act applies to your specific business, talk to someone qualified. The primary sources are Directive (EU) 2019/882 and the technical standard EN 301 549; anything below is a summary of those.)

Who this actually covers

The Act targets consumer-facing digital services. In practice that means e-commerce, online banking, transport booking, e-books and similar services sold to consumers in the EU.

The detail that catches people out: it doesn't matter where your company is. The test is whether you sell to EU consumers. A US or Czech shop that ships into the EU is in scope the same as a business headquartered in Berlin. If your customers are European, the rule is yours too.

There's one meaningful carve-out. Microenterprises providing services — fewer than 10 people and under €2 million annual turnover — get a break on the service obligations. Above that line, small and medium businesses are expected to comply.

What "accessible" means here

The Act points to a technical standard, EN 301 549, which for websites lines up in practice with WCAG 2.1 level AA — the widely used Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. That sounds abstract; on the ground it's a set of very concrete things, most of which are ordinary good build quality:

• Every function works with a keyboard alone, not just a mouse.
• Text has enough contrast against its background to be readable.
• Images that carry meaning have text alternatives a screen reader can announce.
• Form fields have proper labels, so "enter your email" is spoken, not guessed.
• Information is never carried by colour alone — the error isn't just a red border, it also says what's wrong.

None of that is exotic. Most of it is what a careful front-end already does. The gap, when there is one, is usually a checkout or a form that was built to look right rather than to be operable.

This is already being enforced

It would be easy to file this under "someday." That's not where it is. Within days of the June 2025 deadline, disability-rights organisations in France filed formal legal notices against several major grocery retailers over inaccessible e-commerce sites. Each member state names its own enforcement authority and sets its own penalties — France, Germany and Italy already have theirs operating.

The direction is clear: this is a live obligation with people actively testing compliance, not a dormant one.

What a scan can — and can't — tell you

Here's where I have to be honest about the limits of any automated tool, mine included.

A scan genuinely helps with the mechanical failures. Missing alt text, poor colour contrast, unlabeled form fields, a missing accessibility statement — automated checks catch a real and useful share of WCAG issues, and clearing them removes the most common, most obvious problems fast.

But a meaningful part of accessibility can't be measured by a machine. Whether your site is actually usable with a screen reader, whether the keyboard order makes sense, whether an error message is genuinely understandable — those need a person testing with real assistive technology. So treat a scan as a first pass that finds the low-hanging failures, not as a certificate that says you're compliant. Anyone selling you the second thing is overselling.

The sensible order is the same as always: find the mechanical problems today, fix them, and if the EU is a real market for you, plan a proper manual audit on top. Start by seeing where your site stands — the accessibility checks will show you the failures a tool can catch, which is the right place to begin, not the place to stop.