The European Accessibility Act Is Now in Effect: What U.S. Businesses Operating Online Need to Know

The European Accessibility Act enforcement deadline passed on June 28, 2025. If your business reaches customers in any EU member state (through an e-commerce site, a software product, a booking platform, or any digital service) the legal baseline for accessibility compliance has changed.

This isn’t a distant regulatory development to monitor. It’s in effect now.

What the EAA Is

The European Accessibility Act is a directive from the European Union that establishes minimum accessibility requirements for a broad range of products and services. It was adopted in 2019 and required member states to transpose it into national law, with the compliance deadline for businesses set at June 28, 2025.

The law covers digital products and services including websites, mobile applications, e-commerce platforms, banking services, e-readers, ticketing systems, and digital communications. Unlike accessibility guidelines that are advisory in nature, the EAA creates enforceable obligations with penalties for non-compliance varying by member state.

For the products and services it covers, the technical baseline is WCAG 2.1 Level AA, the same standard that governs WCAG compliance under ADA Title III in the United States and is now referenced by the EU’s harmonized standard EN 301 549.

Why U.S. Businesses Are Not Exempt

A business doesn’t need to be headquartered in the EU to be subject to EAA requirements.

The determining factor is whether the business makes products or services available to consumers in EU member states. If a U.S.-based company sells to German customers, books appointments from French users, or licenses software to organizations in the Netherlands, the business is operating in the EU market and the EAA applies.

The mechanism is consistent with how most regulatory bodies approach cross-border consumer protection: jurisdiction follows the market, not the company’s address.

This creates a compliance obligation that many U.S. businesses have not assessed, in part because the EAA has received significantly less coverage in U.S. business media than ADA Title III litigation has. That it has received less attention doesn’t reduce the obligation.

What the EAA Requires in Practice

The EAA requires that covered digital products and services be perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust, the four principles that WCAG 2.1 AA is organized around.

For a small service business website, this means: images need descriptive alt text. Videos need captions and transcripts. Forms need clearly associated labels and error messages that don’t rely on color alone. The site needs to be navigable by keyboard. Interactive elements need to communicate their state to assistive technologies. Color contrast ratios need to meet the 4.5:1 minimum for normal text.

None of these requirements are new. They are the same requirements that have applied under U.S. ADA accessibility guidance for several years. The EAA applies them with the force of EU law to any business reaching EU consumers.

The practical implication: if your site already meets WCAG 2.1 AA, you are in the right position. If it doesn’t, and most small business websites don’t, regardless of what developers may have communicated, the EAA is one more reason the audit is not optional.

How the EAA Differs from ADA Title III

Both the EAA and the ADA reference WCAG as the technical standard. There are meaningful differences in scope and enforcement.

The EAA is more specific about which products and services are covered and more prescriptive about documentation requirements. Larger businesses in covered sectors are required to provide accessibility statements and a feedback mechanism for users to report accessibility barriers. For smaller businesses, certain provisions are relaxed based on a proportionality principle, but the core technical requirements remain.

Enforcement varies by member state. Each EU country has designated a national supervisory authority responsible for monitoring compliance and handling complaints. Penalties range from warnings and corrective orders to financial sanctions. The amounts vary considerably across member states.

ADA Title III, by contrast, has historically been enforced primarily through private litigation in the United States. The EAA’s public enforcement model through national authorities represents a different risk profile, less driven by plaintiff-side law firms, more driven by regulatory oversight.

The Position This Creates for U.S. Businesses

A business that reaches EU consumers and has no accessibility compliance in place is now operating with a documented gap in a regulated market.

For businesses that have been watching the ADA accessibility conversation in the U.S. and deferring action, the EAA changes the calculus. The argument for deferral was that U.S. accessibility litigation, while real, was concentrated in certain industries and plaintiff-specific. The EAA is a different kind of exposure: a regulatory requirement with a clear technical standard and a defined enforcement structure.

The businesses best positioned to navigate both regimes are those that have treated accessibility as a compliance baseline rather than a reaction to individual demands. A site that meets WCAG 2.1 AA satisfies both the ADA technical guidance and the EAA standard. There’s no separate EU compliance track for businesses already operating at that level.

The competitive dimension is real. Accessibility signals competence and reach. A U.S. business that proactively meets EU accessibility standards communicates that it operates professionally in international markets, a signal that larger institutional buyers and EU-based partners notice.

What to Do If You Haven’t Assessed Your Site

The first step is an audit, understanding what the current state of the site is against the WCAG 2.1 AA standard. Automated scanning tools can identify a portion of accessibility failures, but they are not sufficient on their own. Automated tools typically catch 30–40% of WCAG failures. The remaining issues require manual review.

An audit produces a prioritized list of failures by severity and impact. Not all of them carry equal legal weight or affect the same proportion of users. A qualified accessibility audit structures the findings so that remediation can be sequenced intelligently, addressing the highest-impact barriers first, rather than working through a flat list of technical issues.

For more context on the U.S. legal landscape and what a real accessibility audit includes, The Small Business Owner’s Guide to Website Accessibility covers both in depth.

The EAA is in effect. If your business reaches EU customers, the compliance question is not whether it applies, it’s where your site currently stands against it.

COREaccess™ is built around exactly this kind of clarity: a structured audit, a prioritized remediation path, and an ongoing monitoring approach for businesses that need to maintain compliance rather than treat it as a one-time project. The COREaccess™ Accessibility Leadership System covers the full framework — audit, remediate, train, and monitor — for organizations that need documented, standards-based conformance.

If you’re not sure where your site stands, a 15-minute conversation is the right place to start.