Accessibility Watch › EAA & Compliance
The European Accessibility Act: Who It Covers and What It Requires
If you sell to customers in the European Union, web accessibility stopped being optional on 28 June 2025. That’s the date the European Accessibility Act (EAA) became enforceable across EU member states — and unlike the ADA, it’s a written, harmonized law with an explicit technical standard.
What is the European Accessibility Act?
The EAA — formally Directive (EU) 2019/882 — is an EU-wide law requiring a defined set of products and services to be accessible to people with disabilities. Each member state has transposed it into national law, so enforcement and penalties happen at the national level, but the baseline requirements are common across the bloc.
When did it take effect?
It became enforceable on 28 June 2025. The directive was adopted in 2019 with a multi-year runway; that runway is over. Some member states allow limited transition periods for specific service contracts, but the obligation itself is live.
Who does it cover?
The EAA targets the products and services people use most online and in daily commerce, including:
- E-commerce — online stores and the full purchase journey
- Banking and financial services — consumer banking, payments
- E-books and e-readers
- Transport — ticketing, check-in, real-time travel information
- Telecommunications and audiovisual media access services
Crucially, the EAA applies to economic operators placing covered products or services on the EU market — which includes non-EU companies, such as US businesses, that sell to EU consumers. Your company’s location doesn’t exempt you; your customers’ location is what counts. There are narrow exemptions, including for microenterprises providing services, but most businesses selling into the EU fall in scope.
What standard does it require?
The EAA itself states functional accessibility requirements rather than naming a single web standard, but in practice conformance is demonstrated through the harmonized European standard EN 301 549, which incorporates WCAG 2.1 Level AA. That’s the same technical bar that matters for US ADA exposure — which is the good news: meeting WCAG 2.1 Level AA puts you in a strong position on both sides of the Atlantic at once.
What this means in practice
If you have EU customers, treat WCAG 2.1 Level AA as a baseline obligation, not a nice-to-have. The most common failures are the same ones automated tools flag everywhere — missing text alternatives, insufficient contrast, unlabeled controls — and they’re fixable.
The free wcagcheckr extension checks your pages against WCAG 2.1 Level AA and shows you how to fix what it finds.
Check your site — free
Web accessibility is required under the ADA and the EU's European Accessibility Act. The free wcagcheckr extension finds the issues on your own pages and shows you exactly how to fix each one — at no cost.