The European Accessibility Act: what UK businesses should know
The European Accessibility Act comes into force in June 2025. If you sell to EU customers, it applies to you - regardless of Brexit.
The European Accessibility Act (EAA) comes into force on 28 June 2025, and there's a common misconception among UK businesses like yours that it doesn't apply to them post-Brexit. It does, if you sell products or services to customers in the EU. And given that the EAA covers e-commerce services, banking, and a wide range of digital products, that includes a lot of UK companies. Does it include yours?
The EAA requires that products and services covered by the directive are accessible to people with disabilities. For websites and digital services, this essentially means meeting WCAG 2.1 Level AA, the same standard that the UK's own Equality Act 2010 has been interpreted to require, though the EAA makes the requirement more explicit and enforceable.
What's covered
The directive covers: e-commerce services (any website where you sell products or services to EU consumers), banking services, electronic communications, audiovisual media services, e-books, and transport services. If your UK business has an e-commerce site that accepts orders from EU countries, you're in scope.
What does that mean for you in practice? The specific requirements map closely to WCAG 2.1 AA. That means: all content must be perceivable (text alternatives for images, captions for video, sufficient colour contrast), operable (keyboard accessible, no time traps, no content that causes seizures), understandable (readable text, predictable navigation, input assistance), and robust (compatible with assistive technologies).
What this means practically
For most UK businesses, the practical impact is that your website needs to meet WCAG 2.1 AA. If it already does, you're largely covered. If it doesn't, and most sites don't, fully, you have about a year to get there.
In my experience, the most common failures I see in audits are: insufficient colour contrast (particularly on buttons and links), missing alt text on images, forms without proper labels, navigation that doesn't work with a keyboard, PDFs that aren't tagged for accessibility, and videos without captions.
Overlays are not the answer
I want to be direct about this because I know the sales pitches are coming: accessibility overlay widgets (the ones that add a toolbar to your site claiming to "fix" accessibility) do not make your site compliant. The European Disability Forum has explicitly stated that overlays do not achieve conformance with accessibility requirements. Several overlay vendors have been sued. They're a sticking plaster over structural problems, and the EAA requires the underlying structure to be accessible.
What to do now
Get an accessibility audit of your current site. This doesn't need to be expensive, a competent developer can run automated testing tools (axe DevTools, WAVE) to catch the obvious issues, and a manual review of key user journeys will reveal the rest. Prioritise the findings by severity: issues that prevent users from completing core tasks come first, cosmetic issues come later.
Build accessibility into your development process going forward. Every new component and every content update should meet WCAG 2.1 AA as a baseline. This is far cheaper than remediating an entire site retrospectively.
If you're not sure where you stand, or you need help planning remediation, I can run an audit and give you a prioritised action plan, get in touch.
Chris Ryan
Managing Director
17+ years in full-stack web development, most of it leading teams agency-side across e-commerce, CMS platforms, and bespoke applications. Specialises in infrastructure, system integration, and data privacy, with hands-on experience as a Data Protection Officer. Founded Innatus Digital in 2020 to offer the kind of honest, technically-led partnership that he felt was missing from the agency world.