On 28 June 2025, accessibility stopped being a best practice for much of the digital economy and became a legal requirement. The EAA’s reach extends well beyond Europe — and so should your response.
On 28 June 2025, accessibility stopped being a best practice for a large part of the digital economy and became the law. The European Accessibility Act is now in force — and its reach extends well beyond Europe.
The EAA sets common accessibility requirements across the EU for a wide range of digital products and services, from e-commerce and banking to ticketing and consumer software. Any business selling into the EU market is affected, regardless of where it’s headquartered. The practical standard is EN 301 549, which leans on the WCAG guidelines at the AA level.
For most teams, conformance starts with WCAG: perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust interfaces. That means real keyboard support, sufficient colour contrast, meaningful focus states, labelled controls, captions, and content that works with assistive technology — not a bolt-on accessibility widget.
The hardest parts are usually the bespoke ones: a custom combo box, a date picker, a drag-and-drop interaction. These are exactly the components that look fine and fail silently for someone using a screen reader. Getting them right takes real engineering, not a checkbox.
We’ve stopped treating accessibility as a separate audit at the end and started treating it as a property of good design. Adequate contrast, clear hierarchy, predictable navigation, and honest focus management make a product better for everyone — not only users with disabilities. The regulation just gives the work a deadline and teeth.
There’s a market argument too. An inaccessible product excludes a large share of potential customers from buying at all. Compliance protects against fines and removal from market, but accessibility also widens the audience that can actually use what you ship.
Accessibility isn’t a feature you add. It’s a constraint that, taken seriously, makes the whole product clearer.
Start with an honest audit against WCAG 2.2 AA, prioritise the flows that matter most — checkout, sign-up, core tasks — and fix the custom components that hide the worst failures. Bake keyboard and screen-reader checks into the definition of done so regressions get caught in review, not in a complaint.
The EAA didn’t invent these expectations. It just made it expensive to keep ignoring them.
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