The European Accessibility Act (EAA) represents a paradigm shift, transforming accessibility from a recommended practice to a legal obligation for businesses across the globe.
With the compliance deadline of June 2025 quickly approaching, businesses operating in the EU market face substantial risks if they fail to meet accessibility standards outlined in EN 301 549, a set of compliance guidelines derived from WCAG 2.1 AA.
The penalties for non-compliance with the EAA are a bit unique in that they are mandated by specific EU member states. Therefore, there is variance in the penalties, but it can include fines, market restrictions, and even criminal charges in severe cases.
Here are a few examples of noted penalties for non-compliance across a few member states:
- Germany: Fines can reach €50,000 for non-compliant products.
- Ireland: Directors of offending companies who persistently fail to comply may be sentenced to up to six months in prison.
- France: Products found non-compliant may be banned from the market outright, with daily fines for unresolved issues.
- Denmark: Non-compliance can result in fines calculated as a percentage of company revenue, ensuring significant financial impact.
These examples illustrate how enforcement under the EAA isn’t uniform; each member state enacts its own policies for compliance oversight and penalties. Naturally, this variability increases compliance complexity for businesses operating across multiple countries in the EU.
With less than six months to be in compliance, this article is meant to act as a proactive approach to help organizations mitigate legal and financial risks, build ongoing compliance resilience, and create conformant digital experiences.
1. Why the EAA Adds Legal Muscle to Accessibility
Unlike earlier regulation frameworks, the EAA integrates accessibility into consumer protection laws, holding organizations accountable for ensuring accessibility across digital and physical goods.
Compliance should not be viewed as optional for businesses operating in the EU or offering their products and services to consumers there. Starting in June of this year, it is a requirement for market entry and continued operation.
Key Enforcement Mechanisms
- Financial Penalties: As outlined above, these are designed to be substantial and increase for repeat offenses. Thus, they add real teeth to building and deploying inaccessible products. For example, Sweden calculates penalties based on company revenue (like Denmark), while Spain includes additional charges for causing consumer harm.
- Market Restrictions: Non-compliant products can be removed from sale or excluded from public tenders. This could become increasingly relevant in situations where a government contract, for example, could be revoked due to non-accessible software in Italy or France based on their member state enforcement policies.
- Litigation: Companies may face lawsuits from consumer advocacy groups, regulators, or individuals. This is similar to the practices we have seen in the U.S. for many years, with high-volume plaintiffs actively filing lawsuits and demanding letters claiming non-compliance with the ADA. It is not unrealistic to think this same practice might take the EU by storm under the clear-cut compliance requirements outlined by the EAA.
2. Common Risk Areas for Businesses Under the EAA
As has been seen in the U.S. for many years following legal action, compliance with WCAG and, therefore, EN 301 549 is not a box-checking exercise with an easy-button solution. Being accessible requires addressing nuanced challenges across digital operations, and businesses often stumble in the high-risk areas outlined below.
Incomplete Accessibility Implementation
Automated tools, while highly useful for scaling accessibility, only realistically detect about 30% of accessibility issues currently, leaving critical gaps unresolved.
- Example Issue: A dynamic content modal (popup) that is not announced to screen readers may pass automated checks but poses a significant usability barrier for an end-user with a vision disability who relies on screen reader assistive technology.
- Technical Insight: Use live-user testing to verify the accuracy of the ARIA role and ensure that modals are correctly labeled and that focus is appropriately returned to the triggering element after closing.
Untrained Development and Design Teams
Accessibility failures often stem from knowledge or process gaps in design and development workflows. Some examples of this could include:
- Navigation Structure: Designers inadvertently create complex navigation patterns without considering keyboard-only users who cannot operate a mouse to engage a hover-state menu.
- Interactive Elements: Developers deploy third-party widgets or plug-ins (such as sliders or date pickers) that do not meet WCAG compliance, creating compliance and usability gaps while also increasing the business’s legal risk.
Actionable Solutions for Compliance:
- Perform manual accessibility testing of key web or mobile user flows and components to provide real-world usability and technical feedback on compliance gaps that your team can then prioritize fixing.
- Conduct role-specific accessibility training for designers, content creators, and developers to provide your team with the proper baseline knowledge of building and deploying accessible products.
- Provide teams with access to Knowledge Articles (such as in our Allyant HUB) to act as a repository, for example, use cases and code snippets when building new features or content.
Outdated Procurement Processes
Under the EAA, organizations are directly responsible for ensuring compliance with third-party tools and services they use or deploy internally and externally.
- Example: A retail company procured a non-compliant website chatbot, leading to severe accessibility complaints and requiring the deployment of a new solution. (I would recommend considering Olark!)
Steps to Mitigate Procurement Risk:
I will outline a few key steps below, but I would also recommend this recent article, in which I provide highly detailed best practices for evaluating technology for accessibility in procurement!
- Request updated VPAT ACRs that explicitly align with EN 301 549 from all vendors – new and existing to at least document some level of compliance review.
- Conduct lightweight manual accessibility testing on vendor-supplied demos while in procurement or the software you have currently deployed, verifying at minimum in a baseline review:
- Keyboard-only operability.
- Screen reader functionality across major assistive technologies (e.g., NVDA, JAWS, VoiceOver).
- 3. Establish contractual clauses holding vendors accountable for maintaining compliance with periodic reviews. This should come as no surprise to vendors with the EAA-specific mandates and legal requirements for your business going forward.
3. Building a Roadmap to Avoid Penalties and Ensure Resilience
Compliance isn’t about meeting a deadline but building sustainable processes that adapt to evolving standards. Here’s a structured approach:
Step 1: Conduct In-Depth Accessibility Audits
Comprehensive audits form the foundation of an effective compliance strategy by providing your team with a tangible health assessment of where you stand today and what needs to be improved to meet the WCAG requirements outlined in EN 301 549.
Key Areas to Focus On:
- Digital Properties: Evaluate all websites and mobile apps your team manages and deploys to consumers and the software you provide to organizations or procure as a purchaser. This should be certain to include and document manual live-user testing, so you are testing to the full WCAG success criteria, as well as specifically document testing by people with disabilities to build out your risk mitigation strategy.
- Critical User Journeys: You cannot test every page of a website or application completely, nor is that necessary in today’s software development landscape. Focus on identifying high-traffic user paths (such as purchasing) along with essential templates and components that are replicated throughout your website or application. This includes areas like payment pages, forms, and navigation elements, ensuring they comply with WCAG 2.2 AA.
- Hardware-Software Integration: If applicable, test the accessibility of devices like kiosks or ATMs to confirm compliance with both EN 301 549 and device-specific standards.
Advanced Practice: Use trend-based reporting to visualize progress over time, helping teams stay on track with remediation goals and build out an active risk mitigation strategy. We provide this reporting and key prioritization metrics in our Allyant HUB.
We would be happy to provide a demo to your team on how this would immediately roadmap accessibility compliance with the EAA for your websites and applications!
Step 2: Monitor and Adapt Compliance Efforts
Compliance is an ongoing effort, and accessibility is a journey, not a destination, for any organization or digital product. This is increasingly relevant with global regulations being released consistently, sometimes with nuanced requirements for compliance.
To ensure that your team is constantly monitoring for accessibility and maintaining ongoing compliance with the European Accessibility, your accessibility roadmap should include:
- Regular Testing: Schedule maintenance audits of core user paths and components at a minimum annually following QA testing of your remediation efforts to ensure ongoing compliance. We also strongly recommend focused accessibility testing for every product or feature update; this way, your team is embedding accessibility testing and real-time remediation into your design and development workflows rather than deploying inaccessible technology.
- Stay Informed: Partner with experts to monitor regulatory updates and prepare for future requirements. At Allyant, we also strongly encourage our clients to attend our ongoing webinars, read our weekly articles, and follow us on LinkedIn to stay updated with key industry updates.
- Iterative Improvements: Use feedback loops to capture and address user pain points in real time. I strongly recommend this be done with your consumers and your employees who may struggle with accessibility access and directly impact their ability to perform their roles effectively!
Act Now to Secure Your EAA Compliance
The June 2025 deadline is a critical milestone for digital accessibility – not only for EU companies but also for those across the globe and the U.S. conducting business in Europe. Businesses that start early and build a robust accessibility roadmap with ongoing compliance metrics and policies will reap long-term rewards.
Allyant provides the expertise, tools, and support to guide you through compliance challenges, helping you avoid penalties while building more inclusive experiences.
If your organization needs help with where to start on your journey to EAA Compliance or is looking for a more robust solution to ensure well-documented compliance, contact our team today!
