Website Accessibility EAA 2025: What Your Business Must Do

In a café off Oxford Street, the owner of a small clothing shop shows me his website and complains about sales. His problem turns out to be website accessibility, and EAA 2025 just made it a legal one. The site is gorgeous: big photos, thin light-grey text on white, a basket hidden behind an unlabelled icon. I ask him to close his eyes and place an order by voice — I switch on the screen reader built into his phone. Twenty seconds later he gives up: the voice reads “button, button, link, image,” the form fields have no names, and he never reaches checkout. “Does anyone actually shop like that?” he asks. Across the EU, tens of millions of people do, and website accessibility is the only way they reach checkout at all. Since June 2025, what he just watched is also a straight breach of the law.

Website accessibility stopped being a topic “for enthusiasts” and a question of good manners. Since 28 June 2025 the European Accessibility Act (EAA) has applied across the EU, and for the first time an inaccessible website is not an aesthetic slip but a legal risk with a real price tag. This isn’t about charity portals or government bodies — it’s ordinary commercial businesses: shops, banks, booking services, anyone who sells to people online.

Here’s the part almost nobody says out loud. The same website that locks out a screen-reader user is half-invisible to the search crawler too. Accessibility and SEO grow from one root — clean structure a machine can understand. So bringing your site in line with the EAA isn’t a compliance tax you pay through gritted teeth; it’s work that lifts your rankings and conversion rate at the same time. Let’s take it in order: what the law requires, who it covers, what WCAG means in plain English, and where to start.

What the European Accessibility Act is, and why June 2025 was the deadline

The EAA is an EU directive (2019/882) that requires a range of products and digital services to be accessible to people with disabilities. It was adopted in 2019; member states got several years to write it into national law, and businesses got time to prepare. That window has closed: since 28 June 2025 the requirements apply and are enforced in practice.

The EAA doesn’t dictate which button your site needs or what colour it should be. It sets a result: the service must be usable by a person with a visual, hearing, motor or cognitive impairment, on equal terms with everyone else. How you get there is the simple chain: law (EAA) → European standard EN 301 549 → the international WCAG guidelines it rests on → a testable checklist at level AA.

One more thing people muddle: the EAA is not the Web Accessibility Directive from 2016, which covered public-sector websites. The EAA is the first to extend similar requirements to private business and consumer services — so “accessibility is for government sites, it doesn’t touch me” stopped being true in 2025.

Who this actually applies to

Most owners are convinced it sails past them — usually wishful thinking. The EAA covers companies selling to consumers in the EU across a broad list:

• Online shops and e-commerce — practically any retail sold online to an end customer.
• Banking and payment services — online banking, payment services, anything tied to consumer finance.
• Transport and ticketing — sites and apps for buying tickets, booking, timetables.
• E-books and e-book stores, plus readers.
• Telecom services and their equipment.
• Audiovisual media services — access to streaming platforms and the like.

The governing principle is where you sell, not where you’re registered. If your company sits in the UK, Poland, Ukraine or anywhere outside the EU, but you sell to end consumers inside the bloc, the rules reach you. That matters especially for a business running a multilingual website that ranks across the EU and taking orders from several member states: you’re already in that market. The simple test — do you sell to people in the EU through a website or app? If yes, assume the EAA applies and prove otherwise only through a specific clause of national law, not by eye.

There’s one notable exception — service-providing micro-enterprises: companies with fewer than 10 staff and turnover (or balance sheet) under €2 million are exempt from part of the service requirements. Don’t get comfortable. The carve-out is narrow, doesn’t cover makers and sellers of physical goods, and evaporates the moment the business grows — and even if you qualify, an inaccessible site keeps losing you customers and rankings. The law is the floor, not the goal.

WCAG in plain English: what an accessible site actually is

WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) rests on four human principles: content must be perceivable (you can see or hear it), operable (you can use it without a mouse), understandable, and reliable (assistive technology reads it correctly). The conformance level the EAA requires is AA. Here’s what that means in practice, no jargon.

Text contrast

Light-grey text on white looks “airy” in a portfolio and unreadable to anyone with low vision. WCAG AA requires a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 for normal text and 3:1 for large text — the most common error and the cheapest to fix: darken the text and check your colour pairs with a contrast checker. If you’re refreshing the palette anyway, bake contrast into the design tokens during a site redesign rather than patch it after the fact.

Keyboard operation

A huge slice of users — people with motor impairments, blind users, plenty of power users — never touch a mouse. The whole site has to work from the keyboard: you can move through it with Tab, see which element holds focus (that very outline designers love to strip away), and get back out of pop-ups.

Text alternatives (alt)

A screen reader can’t see an image — it reads the description from the alt attribute. No description, and for a blind user there’s a hole in that spot, sometimes voiced as a meaningless file name. Every meaningful image needs a short, sensible description; decorative ones get an empty alt so the voice skips them. The bonus marketers love: that same alt is read by Google too, one of the image ranking factors.

Forms with labels

Placeholder text greyed out inside the field doesn’t count as a label: it vanishes the moment you start typing, and screen readers often don’t announce it. Every field needs a programmatically linked <label>, and errors (“invalid email”) must be explained in text, not only with a red border. For a business this is doubly critical — the form is where an enquiry is born, so an inaccessible form cuts straight into sales. If you’re tidying up your lead capture forms, accessibility and conversion get fixed in one move.

Heading structure and semantics

A screen reader moves through a page like a table of contents — jumping from heading to heading. If the page has one real <h1> and a logical hierarchy of <h2>/<h3>, a blind user orients instantly. If the “headings” are just big bold text with no tags, there’s nothing to navigate. The same semantics — buttons as buttons, links as links, lists as lists — is what the search crawler needs too.

Website accessibility and SEO: why it’s one job, not two

A screen reader and Google’s crawler “see” your page alike: neither looks at the picture — both follow the code, the structure, the text. So almost every accessibility requirement doubles as something search rewards, point for point:

Accessibility requirement	What it gives you in SEO
alt on images	Ranking in image search, context for the page
Clean h1→h2→h3 structure	Google understands the content hierarchy, a shot at rich snippets
Meaningful link text	Link equity flows better, anchors make sense
Captions and transcripts for video	Indexable text instead of video that’s “blind” to the crawler
Semantic markup	Cleaner page parsing, the foundation for Schema.org
Fast, lightweight markup	A direct contribution to Core Web Vitals

That last row matters most. Accessible sites tend to be lighter and tidier, which directly improves Core Web Vitals — LCP, INP and CLS, which Google factors into ranking in 2026. Layout that jumps around as it loads (poor CLS) torments both the person who can’t tap the “running-away” button and your rankings.

One more 2026 shift: Google’s AI Overviews and assistants like ChatGPT assemble answers from pages with a clear, machine-readable structure — the very semantics a screen reader needs. Website accessibility, SEO and citation in AI search turned out to be three names for the same code hygiene. And with roughly 15% of people worldwide living with some form of disability, an inaccessible site quietly ships those buyers to a competitor before any regulator enters the picture.

How to run an accessibility audit: where to start this week

A full WCAG audit is specialist work, and some criteria can only be checked by hand with real assistive technology. But you can take the first picture yourself in an evening. Here’s the order, most useful first:

1. Run an automated scanner. Free tools (the axe DevTools or WAVE extensions, Lighthouse inside Chrome) flag contrast, missing alt, and unlabelled fields in a minute. The caveat: automation catches maybe 30–40% of problems — it’s the tip, not the iceberg.
2. Walk the key journey using only the keyboard. Put the mouse away and try the main action on your site — place an order, send a form, make a booking. Wherever focus vanished or you got stuck is a priority bug.
3. Turn on a screen reader and listen. On Mac that’s VoiceOver (Cmd+F5), Windows has Narrator built in, and there’s the free NVDA. Close your eyes and walk through the home page and checkout — it sobers you up faster than any report.
4. Check contrast by hand on the key screens — buttons, links, text over photos, light-grey captions.
5. Write down the findings and size the job. Some fixes (contrast, alt, labels) are hours of work. Some — broken keyboard navigation, dead modals, homemade “buttons” built from <div> — live in the templates, and then it’s more honest to budget for a proper redesign with accessibility at its core than to patch one hole after another.

What you should definitely not do is slap on an overlay widget — the floating “accessibility” button that promises to “fix” the site with a font and contrast toggle. Overlays don’t touch the source code, screen readers frequently ignore or conflict with them, and the WCAG criteria stay unmet, so an overlay does not deliver EAA compliance and in several countries has itself become grounds for lawsuits. Real accessibility is fixed in the markup and the design, not in a layer over the symptom.

What this means for money and timelines

Honestly about cost: there’s no universal price — it depends on how deep the problem sits in the code. On a site built with modern components and tidy semantics, bringing it to WCAG AA is mostly contrast, alt, labels and focus fixes — typically a few hundred to a couple of thousand pounds (or the equivalent in euros). On an old site of homemade “image-buttons” and table layouts, it’s often cheaper to rebuild than repair, and accessibility becomes part of a redesign rather than a separate line item — it slots into what goes into the cost of a website rather than doubling it.

The biggest saving is in time. Designed in at the layout stage, accessibility is almost free — the right contrast, semantic tags and labelled forms don’t cost more than the wrong ones — while bolting it on later costs many times more and always comes out compromised. So if you have a new site or redesign ahead, the cheapest decision available to you right now is to require WCAG AA in the brief.

Who actually wins

Back to the shop owner in the café. By the end he’d stopped asking “who shops like that anyway” and started asking “how much to fix it.” Accessibility has stopped being a gesture of goodwill — since June 2025 it’s a requirement of the EU market, with fines, lawsuits, and a deadline that’s in the past, not the future.

But the winner isn’t whoever grudgingly clears the law’s minimum. It’s whoever grasped that an accessible site is simply a well-built site: screen readers can read it, Google likes it, AI quotes it, and it doesn’t lose a buyer halfway to checkout. The EAA merely made mandatory what was worth doing anyway, and the owners who heard that are quietly taking the audience and the rankings from neighbours still hoping to get away with a floating button in the corner. If you’d rather not size this alone, here’s how to choose a web agency that builds accessibility in by default.