The European Accessibility Act: What Your Website Actually Has to Change

If you run a business in the EU and sell anything online, accessibility stopped being optional in June 2025. The European Accessibility Act is now in force, and unlike most web advice, this one carries fines.

Most articles about it are written by accessibility software vendors with something to sell. This one is written by someone who builds the websites — so it covers what actually has to change in the code, and what it costs.

Does the European Accessibility Act apply to you?

Work through this in order. Most businesses get an answer in under a minute.

• Fewer than 10 employees AND under €2 million turnover? You are a micro-enterprise. Services are exempt. You can stop worrying about the fine — though keep reading, because the same changes help your sales anyway.
• 10 or more employees, or €2 million and above? If you sell online, take bookings, or provide banking, transport, telecom, e-books or ticketing, it applies to you.
• Selling into the EU from outside it? It still applies. The rule follows the market, not your registered address.

EAA deadlines that matter

• 28 June 2025 — in force. Anything placed on the EU market from this date must comply immediately.
• 28 June 2030 — the deadline for services that already existed before that date. If your site was live in early 2025, this is your real deadline.

Five years sounds comfortable. It is not, because the work is not a switch you flip — and because the first request from a customer who cannot use your checkout will arrive long before 2030.

What EAA non-compliance costs

Enforcement is set by each member state, so the numbers vary. Broadly:

• €5,000 to €40,000 for smaller businesses, depending on the country
• Up to 5% of annual turnover for large companies
• In several states, an order to withdraw the service until it complies

The realistic risk for a mid-sized business is not the maximum fine. It is a complaint, an investigation, and weeks of unplanned work under a deadline you did not choose.

The standard you are actually being measured against

The Act itself does not describe pixels. It points at EN 301 549, which in practice means WCAG 2.2 at Level AA. That is the bar. Everything below is what Level AA means for a normal business website.

The eight things that fail most often

These are the issues found on nearly every site that has never been audited, in rough order of how often they appear:

1. Colour contrast

Light grey text on white is the single most common failure on the web. Level AA needs a contrast ratio of 4.5:1 for normal text and 3:1 for large text and interface components. Brand colours are the usual culprit — a pale brand blue on white often fails, and nobody notices until it is measured.

2. Images without alt text

Every image that carries meaning needs a description. Decorative images need an explicitly empty alt="" so a screen reader skips them rather than reading a filename aloud. Product photos on an e-commerce site are where this hurts most.

3. Forms without labels

A placeholder is not a label. It disappears the moment someone types, and screen readers treat it inconsistently. Every field needs a real <label> tied to its input, and every error needs to say what is wrong in text — not just turn the border red.

4. Nothing works without a mouse

Try it now: load your site and navigate using only the Tab key. Can you reach the menu, open the dropdown, get through checkout, and close the cookie banner? Custom dropdowns, sliders and modal dialogs are where this usually breaks, and it is a hard failure.

5. No visible focus indicator

Somewhere in most stylesheets is outline: none, added years ago because the default ring looked untidy. It removes the only cue a keyboard user has for where they are on the page. Replace it with a focus style that matches your design — do not delete it.

6. Video without captions

Pre-recorded video needs captions and audio description. This is the one that costs real money, so budget for it early rather than discovering it in an audit.

7. Headings used as styling

If a heading is an <h4> because that size looked right, the document outline is broken. Screen reader users navigate by heading, the way sighted users skim. Style with CSS; keep the heading levels in order.

8. The cookie banner itself

A dark irony worth checking: many consent banners cannot be dismissed by keyboard, and trap focus behind them. Your GDPR banner failing your EAA obligation is a common and entirely avoidable combination.

How to check your own site in an hour

Before hiring anyone, get a baseline yourself. Free, and you will find most of it:

• Lighthouse — built into Chrome. Open DevTools, run the Accessibility audit. Catches contrast, alt text and labels.
• axe DevTools — a browser extension, more thorough than Lighthouse and clear about what to fix.
• The Tab key test — no tool needed. Navigate your most important journey with the keyboard alone. This finds what automated tools cannot.
• Your own screen reader — NVDA on Windows is free, VoiceOver ships with macOS. Ten minutes is genuinely revealing.

Be clear about the limit: automated tools catch roughly a third of WCAG issues. They will tell you a button has no accessible name; they cannot tell you the name makes no sense.

What it costs to fix

Honest ranges for a normal business site, based on what the work actually involves:

• Audit and report — a few days. You get a prioritised list rather than a 400-row tool export.
• Contrast, alt text, labels, focus states — usually the largest share of failures and the cheapest to fix. Often a week.
• Keyboard and screen-reader fixes on custom components — dropdowns, modals, carousels, checkout. This is where the real time goes.
• Video captioning — priced per minute, and the one line that can dwarf the rest.

Speed work often lands in the same pass — the same rebuild that makes a site fast is usually where the accessibility fixes are cheapest to make. A site built on a modern framework with a clean component library is far cheaper to fix than a decade-old template with custom jQuery widgets. If you are already planning a rebuild, doing both together costs a fraction of doing them separately.

The part nobody puts in the compliance articles

Every fix above also improves the site for people who are not disabled at all.

Proper labels and heading structure are what search engines read. Keyboard support is what power users expect. Contrast is what makes your site legible on a phone in daylight — which is how most of your customers actually see it. Captions are watched by everyone on a train.

It is the same argument as speed: a site that quietly turns people away rarely tells you it is doing it. Roughly one in four adults in the EU has some form of disability. On an e-commerce site, a checkout that cannot be completed by keyboard is not a compliance problem; it is a checkout that loses sales quietly, and has been for years.

Where to start on Monday

• Run Lighthouse on your three most important pages — home, a product or service page, and checkout
• Do the Tab key test on the same three
• Fix contrast and form labels first: cheapest, highest volume of failures
• Book the video captioning, because it has the longest lead time
• Write down what you did and when — if a complaint ever arrives, evidence of a plan matters

If you would rather hand it over

I build and fix websites on ASP.NET Core and Next.js, and accessibility work is part of how I build rather than something bolted on afterwards. Here is how I work with European clients — rates in euros, invoicing that suits your accountant, and enough timezone overlap with CET for a real conversation before lunch.

Send me your URL and I will tell you honestly whether you are exempt, roughly what it would take, and whether you need me at all.