The European Accessibility Act: What UK Businesses Need to Know

28 June 2025. That’s when the European Accessibility Act kicks in, bringing fresh legal requirements for websites and digital services right across the EU. If your business serves EU customers, you’ve got potential compliance obligations to think about and a public sector digital specialist can help you stay ahead of the requirements.

Six months out from the deadline and this thing’s got teeth. We’re talking enforceable accessibility standards hitting ecommerce sites, service platforms, SaaS providers and almost any business with EU-facing digital touchpoints.

Legal Framework for Digital Accessibility

Why the shake-up? Before 2019, each EU country could set whatever accessibility rules they fancied, which meant businesses juggling different requirements across markets whilst disabled users faced a postcode lottery for digital access.

Enter unified legal requirements that make sense. Websites where people buy products, book services, manage accounts or generally interact with businesses online all fall under the scope, which covers:

• Online shops and ecommerce platforms
• Company websites offering services to the public
• SaaS platforms and software providers
• Banking, insurance and financial services
• Travel booking and hospitality systems
• Customer portals and service dashboards

Got EU users buying your products or using your services online? Your website needs to hit recognised accessibility standards. We’re talking legal requirements here, not suggestions you can ignore.

Technical Requirements and Standards

Digital services under the EAA must tick four boxes: perceivable, operable, understandable and reliably functional, which maps perfectly onto the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. You won’t find WCAG mentioned by name in the Act’s legal text, but dig into the referenced EU harmonised standard EN 301 549 and there it is. That standard bakes WCAG 2.1 Level AA right in as your technical compliance benchmark.

For most businesses, aligning with WCAG 2.1 AA remains the most reliable way to demonstrate conformance with European accessibility law. The standard covers the technical areas regulators test for, so meeting it puts you on solid ground whenever your site faces a formal review.

What does compliance look like? Building accessibility features that work properly for everyone, starting with these key requirements:

• Logical page structure using headings and subheadings
• Compatibility with screen readers and assistive technologies
• Adequate colour contrast between text and background
• Clear and consistent navigation
• Full keyboard access for forms, links and interactive elements
• Accessible form labels and error messages
• Touch targets large enough for mobile and touchscreen use

Better usability for disabled users? Your entire user base benefits from clearer navigation and more intuitive design choices.

Common Compliance Barriers

Website owners don’t realise they’re breaking basic accessibility rules until it’s too late. We see the same compliance failures crop up across B2B sites and ecommerce platforms that would trigger investigations.

• Images without descriptive alt text
• Menus or navigation unusable with keyboard-only input
• Poor contrast between text and background colours
• Form fields without labels or helpful error handling
• Buttons or links too small for mobile interaction
• Videos without captions or transcripts
• Disorganised heading structures that confuse assistive technologies

These issues won’t bother most visitors during casual browsing. But they render websites completely unusable for people with disabilities and get flagged immediately during professional accessibility audits.

Grace Periods and Transition Rules

Physical products like ATMs and payment terminals get a five-year grace period under the EAA (retrofitting hardware gets complicated and expensive quickly). Websites launched or significantly updated after 28 June 2025 need to meet accessibility requirements from day one. No grace period exists for digital services.

Older websites may qualify for limited exemptions under a “disproportionate burden” clause, but these exemptions are rarely accepted for standard business websites. Regulators expect that most digital accessibility improvements are technically straightforward and proportionate in cost, so claiming the burden is too great rarely holds up under scrutiny.

Courts and regulators won’t accept exemption claims anymore because accessibility improvements are now seen as both technically achievable and cost-effective for most digital services. Planning for full compliance is the safer route for any business with EU-facing digital services.

Enforcement Across EU Member States

While the European Commission created the Act, enforcement happens at member state level. This means local regulators in Germany, France, Spain, the Netherlands and other countries handle their own complaints, investigations and penalties.

Serving EU customers online? UK businesses can’t dodge these rules just because they’re based here. French authorities can investigate and take enforcement action against any business when a customer in France reports an inaccessible website, regardless of where that business operates from.

The European Commission watches over how things get rolled out, but they’re not the ones knocking on doors for compliance checks. That’s down to individual countries who each handle complaints and enforcement their own way, though everyone’s working from the same rulebook.

Does the European Accessibility Act Apply to B2B?

Mostly, no. The European Accessibility Act is consumer legislation. Its obligations attach to products and services supplied to consumers, such as ecommerce aimed at the public, consumer banking, ticketing and e-books. A service sold strictly from one business to another sits outside the scope of the Act, so a purely B2B website or platform has no direct EAA compliance deadline.

The complication is that few businesses are purely B2B in practice. If your ecommerce accepts orders from members of the public as well as trade customers, the consumer facing side is in scope. Products supplied to other businesses can also carry accessibility obligations up the chain when they end up inside something sold to consumers. And because the Act is a directive rather than a regulation, each member state has written its own implementing law, with some going further than the minimum.

For UK businesses the Act does not apply domestically, but it does apply the moment you provide an in-scope service to consumers in the EU, which is exactly the position many UK ecommerce businesses are in. The European Commission’s own guidance confirms the consumer focus and the micro-enterprise exemption for service providers with fewer than ten staff and turnover under two million euros. If you are unsure which side of the line you fall on, the safest commercial answer is usually to meet WCAG 2.2 AA anyway, since that is the technical standard the EAA maps to and the direction every other accessibility regime is heading.

Preparing for Compliance

Got EU customers browsing your site? Time to figure out where you stand on accessibility because June’s creeping up fast and fixing these things properly isn’t a weekend job.

When we build sites, accessibility gets built in from day one rather than bolted on later. Our WordPress development works this way and we run detailed audits that’ll show you exactly what needs fixing and how to tackle it.

Building with WCAG compliance from the start means you won’t end up with costly accessibility retrofits down the line (trust us, we’ve seen those bills). Our web development process puts compliance checks at every stage so problems get caught early.

Already got a site that needs work? Our maintenance and security services roll accessibility fixes right into your regular updates. Much cheaper than scrambling to fix everything when regulators come knocking.

Professional accessibility auditing shows you exactly where you stand and what needs fixing first. You don’t want to be the business learning about compliance requirements through an enforcement letter.

June 2025. That’s when EU accessibility law kicks in and if you’re serving customers across Europe, you need to be ready.