The European Accessibility Act (EAA)

New EU rules on digital accessibility have recently come into force, mandating that websites and mobile apps are accessible to people with disabilities.

(This law does not apply to organisations with fewer than 10 employees and an annual turnover of less than two million euros.)

Some users may rely on screen readers and keyboard navigation or voice commands, while some may interpret audio through captions or transcripts. Digital accessibility is about ensuring that your website can be used in these ways, and that it does not prevent assistive tools from functioning correctly.

How do I check if my website is compliant?

The European Accessibility Act (EAA) does not itself provide specific technical standards; instead compliance with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 is the base requirement (with an update to include WCAG 2.2 compliance expected soon).

Modern coding practices such as semantic HTML markup and structuring (and the correct application of ARIA roles and attributes) will help to ensure that your website is compliant.

There are several tools available to check compliance with the WCAG 2.1 (or 2.2) standard, including the WAVE Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool and Google’s PageSpeed Insights (using Lighthouse).

While these tools provide valuable insights for identifying potential issues, they are automated, and may flag some items as warnings that are not failures. These warnings should be reviewed by your website developer, as context often determines whether they are genuine accessibility problems. Therefore, it is important to work with your developer or a web professional to identify which warnings need to be addressed.

Accessibility is not about achieving perfect 'scores' with automated tools. Instead, these tools should be used to find and fix failures, and to verify flagged issues manually to ensure they genuinely impact the user experience.

To comply with the EAA, providers must also publish accessibility statements indicating how they meet the Act’s requirements. Usually, this takes the form of a short ‘Accessibility’ link in the footer of every page, leading to a page outlining compliance with the WCAG 2.1 or 2.2 standard.