The European Accessibility Act, or EAA, is an EU directive that requires a wide range of products and services sold to EU consumers to be accessible to people with disabilities. It is the closest thing Europe has to the American ADA in scope, and it is now in active enforcement, not a future deadline to plan around.

What the EAA actually covers

The directive applies to computers and operating systems, e-commerce platforms, banking services, e-books, audiovisual media services, transportation information systems, and consumer terminals like ATMs and ticketing machines, among other categories. Covered products and services need to meet the “POUR” principles: perceivable, operable, understandable and robust, the same underlying framework WCAG is built on.

Who has to comply

Any organization, regardless of where it is headquartered, that sells covered products or services to consumers in the EU falls under the EAA. That includes manufacturers, importers, distributors and service providers. There is a narrower exemption for microenterprises, defined as fewer than 10 employees and under 2 million euros in annual turnover, but that exemption applies to service requirements specifically and is easy to misread as broader coverage than it is.

Key dates

Enforcement began on June 28, 2025 for new products and services placed on the market after that date. Service contracts that were already in place before June 28, 2025 get a longer runway, until June 28, 2027. Certain products that were already lawfully in use before the 2025 date have until June 28, 2030 under a transitional provision. In practice, this means the “grace period” framing many businesses used going into 2025 has already expired for anything new.

Penalties

Enforcement and penalties are set at the member state level rather than centrally, so the numbers vary substantially. Reported maximum fines range from around 60,000 euros in Ireland to roughly 900,000 euros in Sweden, and France allows daily penalties of up to 3,000 euros for continued non-compliance. Beyond fines, authorities can require product withdrawal, impose market bans, and mandate public disclosure of violations, which carries its own reputational cost.

How the EAA relates to WCAG

The EAA does not invent a new accessibility standard from scratch. The harmonized technical standard, EN 301 549, incorporates WCAG 2.1 Level AA in full as of version 3.2.1, with the upcoming v4.1.1 expected to incorporate WCAG 2.2. Conforming to EN 301 549 creates a presumption of EAA conformity, which is why most practical EAA compliance work starts from a WCAG 2.1 AA baseline rather than a separate checklist.

Where most organizations are still behind

Broader research on this gives a sense of how much work is still outstanding across the web generally. The 2026 WebAIM Million study found 95.9% of home pages had at least one detectable WCAG 2 failure, up from 94.8% the year before, with an average of 56.1 errors per page. That is not an EU-specific number, but it is a reasonable proxy for how far most organizations, EU-facing or not, still are from a genuine WCAG 2.1 AA baseline.

What to do next

Start with a proper audit against WCAG 2.1 AA and EN 301 549 rather than assuming any single tool, widget or otherwise, gets you there on its own. Our guide to choosing between a widget and a manual audit walks through when each approach fits, and our comparison of accessibility tools for EAA compliance covers vendors that specifically map their coverage to this regulation.