Does the European Accessibility Act apply to you?

Three questions settle it. Most pages on this subject are written by people who would like the answer to be yes; a large number of companies are genuinely out of scope, and this says so.

The Act is Directive (EU) 2019/882. It has applied since 28 June 2025. It is a directive, not a regulation, which matters more than it sounds and is dealt with near the end.

Question 1 — is what you sell on the list?

The Act does not cover the economy. It names specific products and services.

ServicesProducts
E-commerce Computers and operating systems
Consumer banking Payment terminals and ATMs
E-books and dedicated software Ticketing and check-in machines
Electronic communications Smartphones and similar
Access to audiovisual media services TVs and set-top boxes with internet
Air, bus, rail and waterborne passenger transport E-readers

If you sell B2B software that is none of these, the Act does not reach you directly. Read on anyway, because the last section is the one that will actually cost you time.

Question 2 — do you offer it to consumers in the EU?

The obligation follows the market, not the head office. A company based outside the EU that sells a covered service to EU consumers is in scope; an EU company selling only to businesses is not, because the Act is about consumer-facing provision.

Question 3 — are you a microenterprise providing a service?

If so, you are exempt from the service requirements. The definition is precise and both parts must hold:

Fewer than 10 people, and an annual turnover or balance sheet total not exceeding €2 million.

The exemption covers services, not products. If you manufacture, import or distribute a covered product, being small does not exempt you.

There is also no grace period built into it. Cross either threshold and the exemption stops applying.

What "accessible" means here

The Act itself states functional requirements rather than a technical specification: information must be perceivable, operable, understandable and robust, and provided through more than one sensory channel. Annex I sets those out.

For anything on the web, the practical target is EN 301 549, the European standard for ICT accessibility, whose web chapter adopts WCAG Level A and AA directly. If you are working to WCAG 2.1 AA you are working to the substance of what the Act asks for.

You will see claims that meeting a standard guarantees compliance. Conformity with a harmonised standard cited in the Official Journal creates a presumption of conformity, which is a legal term of art and not the same as immunity. Check which version is currently cited before relying on it.

Why "directive, not regulation" matters

A regulation applies as written across the EU. A directive is transposed into each member state's own law, and the national text is what binds you. Consequences of this worth knowing:

So the document to read is not the directive. It is your own country's transposition of it, and any secondary source — this page included — is a starting point rather than an answer.

The part that catches people who are exempt

Say you are a six-person SaaS company under €2m turnover. The Act very likely does not bind you as a service provider.

Then a customer's procurement questionnaire asks for your accessibility conformance report, with a deadline.

That request is not enforcement of the Act. It is a buyer who is covered — or who sells to a public body that is — managing their own obligation by pushing it down the supply chain. It arrives as a contract term, and no regulatory exemption touches a contract term. In practice this reaches far more small vendors than the Act itself does.