The European Accessibility Act and UK businesses

Leaving the EU did not take UK businesses out of EU digital law. If you sell goods or services to consumers in the EU, the European Accessibility Act applies to you, and it has been in force since 28 June 2025.

This catches people out because it is easy to assume it is somebody else's problem. It is not a UK regulation, there was no letter, and nothing on your website changed on the day. But the reach is extra-territorial: what matters is where your customers are, not where you are.

Are you actually in scope?

Broadly, yes if you sell online to consumers in the EU. The Act covers e-commerce services along with banking, transport, e-books, and electronic communications. It covers the whole purchase journey, not just the checkout — browsing, product information, account creation, payment and the confirmation.

Two genuine exemptions are worth knowing. Microenterprises providing services — fewer than 10 staff and under €2m turnover — are outside the services requirements. And business-to-business selling is not covered; the Act is about consumers.

If you are a ten-person UK shop shipping to Ireland and Germany, you are almost certainly in scope. Check the microenterprise thresholds against your own numbers before assuming either way, because that exemption is narrower than people hope.

What it actually requires

The technical standard is WCAG 2.1 level AA, reached through the European standard EN 301 549. If you have done accessibility work before, this is familiar ground rather than a new discipline.

In practice that means things like: everything usable by keyboard alone; sufficient colour contrast; text alternatives for images; forms with properly associated labels and errors that are announced, not just coloured red; content that works when text is enlarged; and no reliance on colour alone to convey meaning.

There is one requirement that is not a code change and gets forgotten: you must publish an accessibility statement describing how your service meets the requirements. It has to be publicly available. Plenty of otherwise-compliant sites are missing this.

The 2030 date is not the reprieve it sounds like

Services that already existed get a transitional period to 28 June 2030. That sounds like five years of breathing room, and for a site nobody touches, it is.

The catch: a significant modification can trigger the obligation early for the parts you changed. A redesign, a new checkout, a replatform — the work you were going to do anyway is the thing that brings the deadline forward. Which means the practical planning question is not “when is 2030” but “what am I changing next, and should it be built accessible?”

Building it in from the start costs very little. Retrofitting it into a finished build costs a great deal. That asymmetry is the whole argument for dealing with it at your next project rather than at the deadline.

Enforcement and penalties

Enforcement sits with each member state, so the detail varies by country, and penalties run up to around €500,000 depending on the jurisdiction, with the possibility of daily penalties and public enforcement action.

We would not lead with the fines, though, because for a small business the realistic risk is more mundane and more likely: complaints, a platform or marketplace requiring compliance before it lists you, and larger customers asking for a statement you cannot produce.

What to do first

1. Establish whether you are in scope. EU consumer sales, headcount, turnover. Ten minutes with your accountant settles it.
2. Run an automated scan. Free tools catch perhaps a third of issues, but that third is usually the cheapest to fix.
3. Test the purchase journey by keyboard only. Unplug the mouse and try to buy something. This finds more real problems than any tool, and it takes fifteen minutes.
4. Fix the checkout before anything else. An inaccessible blog post is a shame; an inaccessible checkout is lost revenue and the part regulators care most about.
5. Publish an accessibility statement. Honest about what conforms and what does not, with a route to report a problem.

The part that is not about compliance

Around one in five people has a disability, and a considerably larger group benefits from accessible design — anyone on a phone in bright sunlight, anyone with a bad connection, anyone over sixty. Accessible sites are also generally faster and cleaner, and they tend to do better in search.

We have made this argument at length in the business case for accessible websites. The Act simply removes the option of ignoring it if you sell into Europe.

Every site we build is designed to WCAG 2.2 AA as standard, which is a step beyond what the Act requires — see how we build. If you sell into the EU and want to know where you stand, book a free call and we will go through the purchase journey with you. Selling abroad raises other questions too, which we covered in international SEO.