The European Accessibility Act: What It Requires and What Has Actually Happened

The European Accessibility Act — Directive (EU) 2019/882 — is the most significant piece of digital accessibility legislation in the world, because it is the first to reach deep into the private sector across an entire single market. Member States had to transpose it by 28 June 2022, and the obligations began to apply on 28 June 2025.

More than a year on, we can do something better than speculate about it: we can look at what has actually happened.

Who it covers

The EAA applies to a defined list of products and services, not to every website in Europe. That distinction gets lost in a great deal of the marketing written about it.

Products placed on the market after 28 June 2025: consumer computer hardware and operating systems; self-service terminals including payment terminals, ATMs, ticketing and check-in machines; smartphones and similar consumer terminal equipment used for electronic communications; terminal equipment for audiovisual media services; and e-readers.

Services provided after 28 June 2025: 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; e-commerce services; and the answering of emergency communications to 112.

For most businesses reading this, the operative words are *e-commerce services*, *consumer banking* and *transport*. If you sell goods or services online to consumers in the EU, you are very likely in scope — including if you are based outside the EU. The Act follows the market, not the seller's address.

The microenterprise exemption, stated correctly

This is the single most frequently misreported part of the Act, so it is worth being precise.

A microenterprise is defined as one employing fewer than 10 people and having either an annual turnover or an annual balance sheet total not exceeding €2 million.

Under Article 4(5), microenterprises providing services are exempt from the accessibility requirements and from any obligations relating to compliance with them. A genuinely tiny online shop is out of scope.

Microenterprises dealing with products are not exempt from the accessibility requirements. What Article 14(4) gives them is relief from the paperwork: they need not document their disproportionate-burden assessment, though they must supply the relevant facts if a market surveillance authority asks. You will find articles claiming a blanket microenterprise exemption. There isn't one.

The transition provisions that buy time

Article 32 provides two important allowances. Service providers may continue providing services using products lawfully used before 28 June 2025 until 28 June 2030. And service contracts agreed before 28 June 2025 may continue unaltered until they expire, but for no more than five years from that date — the same 2030 backstop.

Separately, Article 14 allows an economic operator to argue that a requirement would demand a fundamental alteration of the basic nature of the product or service, or impose a disproportionate burden. This is not a loophole to lean on casually: the assessment must be documented, records kept for five years, produced to authorities on request, and renewed whenever the service changes, whenever an authority asks, and in any event at least every five years.

What standard does it actually require?

Here is a point that surprises people: no revision of EN 301 549 has yet been cited in the Official Journal under the EAA. The standardisation request covering the supporting standards was issued in 2022, and the revision it calls for has not yet been cited. That means the formal presumption-of-conformity route is not yet in place under this Directive.

In practice, EN 301 549 is what everyone works to, and its current published version — V3.2.1 — incorporates WCAG 2.1 Level AA for web content. A version 4 aligning to WCAG 2.2 has been through public enquiry and reached final draft at ETSI, but it has not been published or cited. Treat announcements about its arrival date with caution; several confident timelines circulating are vendor projections, not ETSI publications.

The safe engineering answer is to build to WCAG 2.2 Level AA. It is backward compatible with 2.1, so it satisfies today's reference and tomorrow's.

Twenty-seven implementations, not one law

A directive is not a regulation. Member States transpose it into national law, and they did so differently — which means "EAA compliance" is not a single target.

Accessibility statement requirements differ. France requires disclosure of inaccessible sections, accessible alternatives, a complaints route and an update date. Spain requires a complaint contact and update date. Germany requires a service description, an explanation of compliance and the surveillance authority's details. There is no EU-wide template.

Enforcement architecture differs. Germany designated a single market surveillance body covering all 16 Laender. Ireland split enforcement across six sectoral regulators. The Netherlands and Sweden also divide it by sector.

Penalties differ. In Ireland, offences carry up to €5,000 and six months' imprisonment on summary conviction, rising to €60,000 and 18 months on indictment, with director liability. In Germany, administrative fines run up to €100,000.

And thresholds differ. France applies a pre-existing revenue threshold from its 2005 disability law, and as the litigation below shows, that has decided real cases.

What enforcement has actually looked like

France: two rulings, one month apart, opposite outcomes

This is the most instructive story in EAA enforcement so far. In July 2025, disability associations issued formal legal notices to four major French retailers, followed by emergency proceedings in November 2025.

On 6 May 2026, the Tribunal judiciaire de Lille dismissed the claim against Auchan E-Commerce France — not because the site was accessible, but because the court read the transposing provision as preserving the €250 million revenue threshold from France's 2005 law, and that entity fell below it. The court accepted the site was in fact inaccessible to blind users, and the claim still failed. The claimant associations have appealed, and the reasoning is contested: their position is that the 2005 threshold and the Directive's microenterprise threshold are complementary rather than alternatives. Treat it as a first-instance decision under challenge, not as settled French law.

On 4 June 2026, the Tribunal judiciaire de Caen ruled against Carrefour France, ordering it to make its website and mobile app fully accessible within six months, backed by a daily financial penalty. The court treated accessibility as an obligation of result: 100% of the applicable criteria under France's RGAA standard, not partial conformance. Carrefour's claimed 71% conformity was held insufficient.

Two lessons for anyone tempted to treat a conformance percentage as a defence. First, thresholds and national transposition details can decide a case entirely, before anyone examines the website. Second, where the obligation does apply, a French court has now held that partial conformance is not conformance — which aligns exactly with what WCAG itself says about there being no percentage-based conformance.

Germany: warning letters, not regulators

German enforcement so far has been driven not by the market surveillance authority but by private cease-and-desist letters (Abmahnungen) from law firms, citing failures like empty links, low contrast and missing alt text. The current wave demands fees in the region of €2,700; an earlier round in 2025 asked for closer to €600. German lawyers have publicly disputed their validity on several grounds, including whether the sender has standing and whether brochure-style websites are "services" under the Act at all. No German court ruling on website accessibility under the transposing law appears to have been reported yet.

Elsewhere

Sweden's regulator opened its first reviews in October 2025. The Netherlands set a self-reporting deadline in October 2025, after which reporting became mandatory and audits followed. As far as publicly reported information goes, no monetary fine has yet been issued under any national transposition of the EAA — which is a description of the first year, not a prediction about the second.

What to do about it

If you sell to EU consumers online, the practical sequence is unglamorous and effective.

1. Determine whether you are actually in scope — the product and service lists are specific, and the microenterprise services exemption is real.
2. Identify which Member States you operate in, because your statement content, your regulator and your penalty exposure are all national.
3. Test against WCAG 2.2 Level AA across the complete purchase journey, not just your home page. Conformance is claimed for complete processes; a beautiful product page and a broken checkout is not a defence.
4. Publish an accessibility statement that meets the requirements of the countries you sell into. Our guide to writing an accessibility statement covers what these need to contain.
5. Document any disproportionate burden assessment properly, with the five-year retention and review cycle the Act requires.
6. Re-test on a schedule. The Carrefour ruling put a six-month clock on remediation; sites drift far faster than that.

*Article text and dates in this article are from Directive (EU) 2019/882 as published in EUR-Lex. National transposition details are drawn from published law firm analyses; the French rulings are the Tribunal judiciaire de Lille of 6 May 2026 (under appeal) and the Tribunal judiciaire de Caen of 4 June 2026, as reported in French legal and disability-sector press. This article is general information about published law and regulation, not legal advice — take advice on your own circumstances from a qualified lawyer in the relevant jurisdiction.*