The European Accessibility Act (EAA) stopped being “upcoming regulation” more than a year ago: it has applied since 28 June 2025. If you sell online or provide digital services in the EU, the question is no longer whether it affects you, but what state your website is in today.
What follows is the explanation we give on a first call: no scaremongering, no fine print tucked away.
What the EAA is
It is the EU directive (2019/882) requiring certain products and services to be accessible to people with disabilities. In Spain it is transposed by Law 11/2023. For digital services, “accessible” translates in practice into meeting WCAG 2.2 level AA, the technical standard referenced by the European norm EN 301 549.
Are you covered?
The scope is broader than most people think. Among others, it covers:
- E-commerce — any website or app where something can be bought or contracted.
- Consumer banking and financial services.
- Passenger transport (ticketing, check-in, travel information).
- E-books, telecommunications and access to audiovisual media services.
The main exception: service-sector micro-enterprises (fewer than 10 employees and annual turnover or balance sheet not exceeding €2 million) are exempt from the service obligations. Two caveats before relaxing: if you sell to larger companies, your clients will require conformity by contract; and while certain pre-existing services have transitional periods, anything you launch or redesign now is born under the obligation.
What compliance means, concretely
WCAG 2.2 AA is not a statement of intent; it is a set of verifiable criteria. The ones an average website fails most often:
- Sufficient contrast between text and background (elegant grey on white usually fails).
- Keyboard navigation: everything doable with a mouse must be doable with Tab and Enter, with a visible focus indicator.
- Labelled forms: every field with a real label, errors described in text — not just a red border.
- Text alternatives for images that carry information.
- Semantic structure: hierarchical headings, links that say where they go, a declared language.
- Respectful motion: animations that switch off when the user asks for reduced motion.
None of this is exotic: it is build quality. An accessible website is also more usable for everyone, and it tends to rank better.
The real risk
In Spain the sanctioning regime provides for fines from €10,000 up to €1 million in the most serious cases. But the everyday risk is more prosaic: user complaints, B2B contracts that demand conformity, and sales lost silently because a form cannot be completed.
The 10-minute checklist
Before hiring anyone, run these checks on your own site:
- Walk through your purchase or contact flow using only the keyboard. Can you always see where you are? Do you reach the end?
- Set browser zoom to 200%. Does anything break? Does content disappear?
- Run your homepage through an automated checker (Lighthouse or similar). What accessibility score do you get?
- Look at three important images. Do they have alt text that adds anything?
- Submit an empty form. Is the error explained in words, next to the field?
If any of this fails, there is work to do — and what automated tools detect is only part of the standard.
When to ask for an audit
A professional audit reviews what tools cannot see: complete flows, screen readers, focus management, dynamic content. Our accessibility and performance audit starts at €900 and delivers a prioritised report: what to fix first, its impact, and what fixing it costs. No fluff: this very website is our reference standard, auditable by anyone.
Unsure about your specific case? Tell us about it and we’ll reply within 24 h.