The European Accessibility Act

What the European Accessibility Act is

The European Accessibility Act is Directive (EU) 2019/882. It sets common accessibility requirements for a defined list of products and services sold in the European Union, with the aim of ending the situation where an accessible product had to be built twenty-seven different ways.

A Directive is not directly binding on companies. It obliges each Member State to pass its own law. So the requirement that actually applies to you is Spanish law, or German law, or Irish law — and those differ in penalties, enforcement bodies and reporting. The Directive is the floor, not the text you will be judged against.

What it covers

The Directive lists its scope rather than describing it in general terms, which is what makes “does the EAA apply to my website” a question with a real answer rather than a rhetorical one.

Products include consumer computer hardware and operating systems, payment terminals, ATMs, ticketing and check-in machines, consumer terminal equipment for electronic communications, and e-readers.

Services include electronic communications services, services providing access to audiovisual media, elements of air, bus, rail and waterborne passenger transport services, consumer banking services, e-books and dedicated software, and e-commerce.

E-commerce is the entry that reaches the most organisations. It is defined as services provided at a distance, by electronic means and at the individual request of a consumer, with a view to concluding a contract. In practice: if a consumer can buy something on your site, the journey from finding the product to completing the payment is the part to look at first.

Who it may apply to

The obligations fall on economic operators — manufacturers, importers and distributors for products; service providers for services. Being established outside the EU does not remove the obligation if you are selling to consumers inside it.

Who may be exempt

Two exemptions matter most in practice, and both are narrower than they are usually described.

Microenterprises providing services. Fewer than 10 people, and annual turnover or balance sheet total not exceeding €2 million. This exemption applies to the service obligations. It does not extend to microenterprises dealing in products, and it is a threshold you can cross by growing.

Disproportionate burden. A requirement may be disapplied where meeting it would impose a disproportionate burden, assessed against criteria set out in the Directive. This is not a declaration — it is an assessment you carry out, document, and must be able to produce. Member States may require you to notify the relevant authority.

There is also content that simply falls outside scope: archived content that is no longer updated, and third-party content you neither fund, develop nor control.

How it relates to WCAG and EN 301 549

This is the relationship most often described wrongly, including by vendors selling compliance.

• WCAG is a technical standard from the W3C. It is not law anywhere.
• EN 301 549 is the European harmonised standard for ICT accessibility. It incorporates WCAG and adds requirements WCAG does not cover.
• The EAA is legislation, and it points at harmonised standards. Meeting a harmonised standard creates a presumption of conformity for the requirements that standard covers.

So the chain runs: WCAG → EN 301 549 → presumption of conformity under national law implementing the EAA. Meeting WCAG 2.2 Level AA addresses the technical substance. It does not, by itself, discharge the rest — the accessibility statement, the conformity documentation, the internal assessment where you rely on an exemption.

Anyone who tells you a scan makes you “EAA compliant” is describing one link in that chain and calling it the whole thing.

What to do about it

A practical order, which is also the order an audit tends to reveal:

1. Establish whether you are in scope, and for which services. This is a legal question; the list above tells you whether it is worth asking.
2. Audit the consumer-facing journeys first — for e-commerce, product to checkout. This is where barriers stop the transaction rather than inconveniencing it.
3. Fix what blocks completion before what merely degrades the experience.
4. Verify the fixes, because a fix nobody re-tested is a fix nobody has confirmed.
5. Publish an accessibility statement that reflects what you actually found, including what is not yet fixed.
6. Keep the documentation, particularly where you rely on an exemption.

What an audit can and cannot establish

An accessibility audit can tell you what barriers exist, which success criteria they fail, who they affect, and what has to change. It gives you the technical evidence and the remediation plan.

It cannot tell you whether you are legally compliant. That determination depends on your jurisdiction, your national transposition, your organisation’s size, the nature of your service, any exemption you rely on, and the assessment behind it. That is a question for qualified legal counsel, and any supplier who answers it for you in a report is exceeding what they can know.