Last spring I sat in on a call with a US founder who runs a small ecommerce brand. Roughly 20% of his orders ship to Germany, France, and the Netherlands. He had just read a LinkedIn post about the European Accessibility Act and wanted to know if it applied to him. His lawyer said probably. His developer said he was not sure. His overlay vendor said he was already covered, which was flat wrong. Three opinions, zero answers.
Here is the answer I gave him, and the same one I give every US business that sells digital products or services to EU customers. Enforcement of the European Accessibility Act began on June 28, 2025. If you offer covered products or services to EU consumers, you are in scope. Where your company is incorporated does not matter. In most cases, your company size does not matter either.
Who the European Accessibility Act Applies To
The European Accessibility Act, formally Directive (EU) 2019/882, sets common accessibility requirements for a defined list of products and services sold in the EU single market. Member states had to write it into national law by mid-2022, and those national laws became enforceable on June 28, 2025. You can read the full text on EUR-Lex.
The covered services list is where most US businesses get caught:
- Ecommerce services, which includes nearly any online shop selling to EU consumers
- Consumer banking services, including websites, apps, and online payment flows
- Ebooks and their associated reading software
- Communication services such as email and messaging platforms offered to consumers
- Audiovisual media services, including streaming platforms
- Air, rail, bus, and waterborne passenger transport services, covering booking sites, ticketing systems, and mobile apps
- Ticketing and check-in machines, payment terminals, and ATMs
Covered products include computers, smartphones, e-readers, and payment terminals, along with their operating systems. If you manufacture or import hardware, a separate set of product rules applies to you.
The trigger is offering the service to EU consumers, not having a European office. A Shopify store in Ohio that ships to France is in scope. A US ticketing app selling concert seats in Berlin is in scope. A US publisher selling ebooks to readers in Spain is in scope. The one genuine gray area is whether you actively target EU customers. If you accept EU orders, offer EU shipping, or display prices in euros, regulators will treat you as targeting that market.
The Technical Standard: EN 301 549 and WCAG 2.1 AA
The directive itself does not spell out pass or fail test criteria. It states functional requirements, and the practical yardstick is the harmonized European standard EN 301 549. Meeting EN 301 549 gives you a legal presumption of conformity, which is the closest thing this law offers to a safe harbor.
For websites and web applications, EN 301 549 points directly at WCAG 2.1 Level AA. If you have done US accessibility work, this is familiar ground. It is the same conformance level most US courts apply in ADA web cases and the same level Section 508 references. The underlying success criteria are identical, so work you have already done for the US market carries over almost completely.
In practice, that means color contrast of at least 4.5 to 1 for body text, full keyboard operability, visible focus indicators, alt text on meaningful images, labels and clear error messages on forms, captions on prerecorded video, and no content that traps keyboard users or flashes at seizure-inducing rates. Nothing exotic. Our WCAG 2.1 walkthrough covers the criteria one by one, and the W3C maintains an official overview of how the European accessibility policy framework fits together.
The Microenterprise Exemption Is Narrower Than It Sounds
The one real carve-out: microenterprises are exempt from the service requirements. A microenterprise employs fewer than 10 people and has annual turnover or a balance sheet total of no more than 2 million euros.
Understand three limits before you relax. First, the exemption covers services only. If you manufacture or import covered products, it does not help you at all. Second, it depends on national transposition, and a few member states chose to narrow it or skip it. Third, it is a legal exemption, not a market exemption. Marketplaces, payment processors, and B2B partners are starting to demand accessibility evidence from their vendors regardless of size, because their own compliance position depends on yours.
My advice: even if you clearly qualify, get a baseline audit anyway. The exemption disappears the day you hire your tenth employee, and retrofitting accessibility under deadline pressure costs three to five times what planned work costs. Our accessibility fundamentals overview is a good place to start building that baseline knowledge on your team.
Penalties Are Set by Member States, and They Bite
The directive leaves penalties to each country, so enforcement is a patchwork. Germany’s market surveillance authority can fine up to 100,000 euros per violation and order nonconforming products pulled from sale. Spain’s transposition law treats repeat or widespread failures as very serious infringements, with fines that can reach 1 million euros. Several countries pair fines with public naming, and consumer associations in France and Germany have already shown they will file complaints on behalf of users.
Compare that to the US, where web accessibility exposure is mostly private litigation under the ADA. The EU model adds government market surveillance on top. A problem does not need a plaintiff willing to fund a lawsuit. It needs one frustrated customer and one regulator having a busy quarter.
A Pragmatic Compliance Sequence for a US Small Business
Here is the order of operations I use with clients. It assumes a typical small business site or app, not a bank.
Step one: scope and audit. List every customer-facing surface: website, checkout, mobile app, customer portal, PDFs, transactional email templates, chat widgets. Then audit against WCAG 2.1 AA. Automated scanners catch roughly 30% to 40% of real issues, so pair the scan with manual keyboard testing and at least one screen reader pass. Our post on AI-assisted accessibility auditing walks through the tooling and workflow. For a small marketing site, a serious audit runs $3,000 to $8,000. For an ecommerce store with a complex checkout, budget $8,000 to $15,000. Anyone quoting $500 is running one scanner and printing the report.
Step two: remediate in order of legal risk. Fix checkout and account flows first, then site templates and shared components, then content-level issues like alt text and captions. Remediation cost depends entirely on your codebase. A well-built modern site might need 40 to 80 hours of developer time. A theme stacked on top of plugins can triple that. If documents like invoices, statements, or contracts are part of the service, bring them into scope too. Our PDF compliance guide covers that side of the work.
Step three: publish your accessibility documentation. The directive requires service providers to explain how their service meets the accessibility requirements and to keep that information current for as long as the service operates. Publish an accessibility statement that names the standard you conform to, lists known gaps with target remediation dates, and gives users a contact channel for reporting problems. That contact channel is not decoration. Regulators look at whether complaints actually get answered.
Step four: build monitoring into your release cycle. Accessibility decays. Every new landing page, plugin update, or redesign can reopen closed issues. Put an automated scan in your CI pipeline, retest key user flows quarterly, and assign one named person to own the statement and the complaint inbox. The broader program side, including vendor management and staff training, is covered in our web compliance guide.
What I Would Not Do
Do not buy an overlay widget and call it done. Overlays inject a JavaScript toolbar over broken markup. They do not fix your code, they cannot satisfy EN 301 549, and EU regulators treat them as nothing. Our analysis of accessibility overlay widget problems documents why third-party toolbars cannot repair inaccessible HTML at the DOM level. The market signal is clear: in 2025 the FTC fined the largest overlay vendor $1 million for misleading conformance claims in the US market. If the vendor’s own marketing could not survive scrutiny, your defense built on their widget will not either.
Do not wait for a complaint to start. Remediation under deadline always costs more, and the work is the same work you would eventually do anyway.
And do not assume a US ADA settlement covers you. I have watched businesses point at a US consent decree as proof of EU conformity. Different standard references, different documentation duties, different regulators. The underlying WCAG work transfers. The paperwork does not.
The Bottom Line
If you sell covered digital services to EU consumers, the European Accessibility Act already applies to you, enforcement is live, and the technical bar is WCAG 2.1 AA through EN 301 549. That is the uncomfortable part. The encouraging part is that the work is ordinary accessibility work, the kind that also protects you in US ADA cases and usually lifts conversion for every customer, disabled or not.
Start with a real audit. Fix the revenue paths first. Publish your statement. Monitor on a schedule. Budget one to three months for a small site. The businesses that treat this as a product quality project will spend less and sleep better than the ones that treat it as a legal fire drill.
