Binding since 28 June 2025

Is your website required by law to be accessible?

If you sell to consumers in the EU, the answer is almost certainly yes, and the deadline passed over a year ago.

This page answers the question properly: who is in scope, which standard actually binds you, what enforcement looks like, and what it takes to fix a site that was not built for it. If you want the specifics for your own site, we will check it and send you the list.

Read the full EAA guide

Who has to comply

The European Accessibility Act (Directive (EU) 2019/882) covers services offered to consumers in the EU. It has applied since 28 June 2025. There is no transition period left to plan around.

In scope

  • E-commerce: any website or app through which a consumer can buy a product or a service
  • Consumer banking, payment services and insurance sold online
  • Electronic communications: telecoms operators, messaging, VoIP
  • Audiovisual media services and the interfaces used to reach them
  • Passenger transport: ticketing, timetables, check-in, real-time travel information
  • E-books, reading software and the shops that sell them
  • Self-service terminals: ATMs, ticket machines, check-in kiosks

Outside it

  • Microenterprises providing services: under 10 people and turnover or balance sheet total of no more than EUR 2 million. Both conditions have to hold at once, and the count is the whole undertaking, not one shop or brand.
  • Pure business-to-business services with no consumer offering
  • Archived content published before 28 June 2025 that is no longer updated
  • Individual features where compliance would be a disproportionate burden, which has to be assessed, documented and reviewed rather than simply asserted

The microenterprise exemption covers services, not products, and it disappears the moment you cross a threshold. There is no grace period on the way up. If you have taken public funding for accessibility, it does not apply to you at all.

One thing companies get wrong: growing out of the exemption is not a future problem to schedule. The obligation attaches when the threshold is crossed, not at the next audit.

Which standard actually binds you

The Act says services must be accessible. It does not spell out the technical criteria. Those come from the harmonised European standard, and knowing which version is in force is the difference between a compliant site and a nearly compliant one.

EN 301 549 V3.2.1 is the version in force

This is the European standard for ICT accessibility, and conformity with it gives you the presumption of conformity with the Act. It references WCAG 2.1 Level AA.

So the operative target today is WCAG 2.1 Level AA

Not AAA, which almost nobody claims and which the Act does not ask for. Not WCAG 2.0, which is superseded. Level AA of WCAG 2.1 is the line you are measured against.

WCAG 2.2 Level AA is the next version, and it is close

A revision of EN 301 549 that picks up WCAG 2.2 Level AA is expected to publish and then be cited in the Official Journal. It adds success criteria on focus appearance, dragging movements, target size and authentication.

We remediate to 2.2 AA regardless

WCAG 2.2 AA is a superset of 2.1 AA in practice. Fixing to 2.2 satisfies today's obligation and means the standard's next revision does not reopen work you have already paid for. Fixing to 2.1 alone means doing this twice.

What enforcement looks like

Each member state names its own market surveillance authority and sets its own penalties, so the number depends on where your customers are. Two things are consistent: the authorities do not wait for a complaint, and the order to fix or withdraw the service usually costs more than the fine.

EUR 100,000
Maximum administrative fine per violation under Germany's BFSG, alongside an order to correct or withdraw the non-conforming serviceBarrierefreiheitsstärkungsgesetz, enforced by the Bundesnetzagentur
Proactive
German market surveillance tests sites on its own initiative rather than waiting for someone to complain, with retail and e-commerce among the first sectors sampledBundesnetzagentur market surveillance practice, 2025 onward
28 June 2025
The date the obligation started applying. Every day since then is a day a non-compliant service has been on the marketDirective (EU) 2019/882, Article 31
27 EU states
Each with its own transposition, its own authority and its own penalty ceiling. Selling across the EU means meeting the strictest of themNational transpositions of the EAA

Procurement is the quieter pressure. Enterprise and public buyers increasingly ask for an accessibility conformance report before they sign, and not having one loses deals long before a regulator ever writes to you.

Almost every site fails, including yours

This is not a guess. WebAIM has run an automated WCAG evaluation across the home pages of the top one million websites every year since 2019. The February 2026 run is the most recent.

95.9%
of the top one million home pages had WCAG 2 A or AA failures that an automated tool can detect, up from 94.8% a year earlierThe WebAIM Million, February 2026
56.1
detectable errors on the average home page, a 10.1% increase in one year that reverses several years of slow improvementThe WebAIM Million, February 2026
96%
of every error detected falls into just six categories. The problem is not exotic, it is the same handful of mistakes repeated at scaleThe WebAIM Million, February 2026
59.1 vs 42
average errors on pages that use ARIA against pages that do not. More ARIA correlates with more failures, not fewerThe WebAIM Million, February 2026

Automated detection is the floor, not the ceiling. These figures count only what a machine can prove, which is a minority of WCAG. A site with zero automated errors can still be unusable with a keyboard or a screen reader, which is why the audit below is not just a scan.

The six failures that are 96% of the problem

Percentages are the share of the top one million home pages carrying each failure in February 2026. If you have never had an audit, assume you have most of these.

  • Low contrast text

    83.9%

    Text that does not meet the 4.5:1 ratio against its background, or 3:1 for large text. Usually a brand palette decision nobody re-checked, and the single most common failure on the web.

  • Missing alternative text

    53.1%

    Images with no alt attribute, or with a filename in it. Decorative images need an empty alt, informative ones need a description. Both cases are wrong more often than they are right.

  • Missing form input labels

    51.0%

    Inputs with a placeholder instead of a label, or a label not programmatically associated with its field. On a checkout this is the failure that costs you the sale, not just the audit.

  • Empty links

    46.3%

    A link whose only content is an icon or an empty element, so a screen reader announces it as "link" and nothing else. Common in navigation, social icons and card layouts.

  • Empty buttons

    30.6%

    The same failure on a control that does something. Hamburger menus, close buttons and icon-only actions are the usual sources.

  • Missing document language

    13.5%

    No lang attribute on the html element, so assistive technology guesses the pronunciation. A one-line fix that a seventh of the web still has not made.

Every one of these is a source code problem with a source code fix. None of them is fixed by a script you paste into your page.

Why we will not sell you a widget

Accessibility overlays are sold as a line of JavaScript that makes a site compliant. They do not, and buying one is now its own risk.

  • In April 2025 the US Federal Trade Commission finalised an order requiring accessiBe to pay USD 1 million over claims that its automated widget could make any website WCAG-compliant, and barring it from repeating those claims without evidence.
  • Sites that had a widget installed were sued anyway. In the first half of 2025, 22.6% of US web accessibility lawsuits targeted sites that already had one.
  • An overlay cannot fix what it cannot see. Contrast defined in your CSS, a heading order that is wrong in your markup, a modal that traps focus: these live in your code, and a script layered over the top does not change them.
  • Overlays frequently break the assistive technology the user already has, because they intercept the same keyboard and screen reader behaviour that software was built to provide.

We fix the source. The result is code you own, that survives your next deploy, and that an auditor can verify.

How we work

The free check is a real piece of work, not a lead magnet with a scan attached. It exists because nobody can quote remediation honestly without seeing the code first.

  1. 1

    Free scoped review

    We take your URL and evaluate a representative set of pages: home, a category or listing page, a product or detail page, and your checkout or sign-up flow. Automated evaluation with axe and WAVE, then manual keyboard and screen reader passes on the flows that matter. You get the findings, mapped to the WCAG success criterion each one breaks, whether or not you hire us.

  2. 2

    Prioritised plan and a fixed quote

    Findings ordered by user impact, legal exposure and effort. Blocking failures in a purchase or sign-up flow come first, because those are both the worst for your users and the ones a regulator reaches for. You get a fixed price and a timeline before any remediation starts.

  3. 3

    Remediation in your repository

    Our engineers work in your codebase, on your branch, to your review standards. Semantics, focus management, labels and error handling, contrast, ARIA that is correct or removed. Component-level fixes so the same bug does not come back on the next page someone builds.

  4. 4

    Verification and a conformance report

    Re-tested with automated tooling and by hand across NVDA, VoiceOver and TalkBack plus keyboard-only navigation. You receive a report documenting the resolved state against EN 301 549 and WCAG, which is the document procurement asks for and the one you want on file if an authority writes to you.

  5. 5

    Keeping it

    Accessibility regresses with every release that nobody checked. Optional ongoing work: regression testing, pre-launch review of new features, and developer training so your team stops introducing the same six failures.

Questions we get asked

We are a B2B company. Are we out of scope?

Probably, for the EAA specifically, which covers services offered to consumers. Check two things before relying on it: whether any part of your offering can be bought by an individual, and whether your enterprise customers require accessibility conformance in their procurement. The second one catches more B2B companies than the first.

We have fewer than 10 employees. Are we exempt?

Only if your annual turnover or balance sheet total is also no more than EUR 2 million, and only for services. Both conditions have to hold. The headcount is measured across the whole undertaking, so a small brand inside a larger group is not a microenterprise.

The deadline passed in June 2025. Are we already in breach?

If you are in scope and your service is not accessible, yes, technically. That is uncomfortable but it is not unusual and it is not a reason to wait. Enforcement authorities generally start with an order to remedy, and being able to show a dated audit and a remediation plan in progress is a materially better position than being able to show nothing.

Is WCAG 2.1 or 2.2 the requirement?

Today, 2.1 Level AA, through EN 301 549 V3.2.1. The revision that adopts WCAG 2.2 Level AA is expected during 2026. We remediate to 2.2 AA so that revision does not reopen the work.

How long does remediation take?

For a typical e-commerce site or SaaS product it is usually a few weeks of engineering, not months, once the audit is done. The variable is not the number of pages, it is the number of distinct components. Fifty pages built from twelve components is a smaller job than eight pages built from sixty.

Can you work with our platform?

Yes. React, Next.js, Vue, Angular and Svelte at the component level. WordPress, Drupal, Shopify, Shopware and Magento at the theme and template level. Native iOS and Android for VoiceOver, TalkBack, touch targets and dynamic type.

What does the free check actually cost us?

A URL and, if the flows we need to test are behind a login, a test account. Nothing else. You keep the findings whether or not you go further with us.

Do you issue the accessibility statement?

We give you everything it has to contain: the conformance status, the criteria assessed, what remains non-conforming and why, and the feedback mechanism. The statement is published by you, in your name, because it is your declaration and not ours.

Get a free check of your site

Tell us where to look. You get the findings back with the WCAG criterion each one breaks, and a fixed quote if you want the fixes.

The findings go to this address.

The site or app you need brought into compliance.

By submitting you agree to our Privacy Policy. We use your details to prepare and send the review, and for nothing else.

Would rather talk it through first?

Book 30 minutes. We will tell you whether you are in scope and roughly what your site is looking at, without the form.