Web Design · 7 min read
Web Accessibility: What the European Accessibility Act Requires
For a long time, web accessibility was a topic for public authorities and large corporations. The European Accessibility Act (EAA) changed that: since 28 June 2025, certain digital offerings in the EU must be accessible, and that includes private companies. In Austria, the Barrierefreiheitsgesetz implements the directive. This article explains, without legalese, who is affected, what is required, and where it makes sense to start. It is not legal advice; when in doubt, that question belongs with a lawyer.
Who the obligation applies to, and who it doesn’t
The EAA targets specific products and services for consumers. On the web, the main affected areas are online shops and consumer e-commerce in general, banking services, e-books, ticketing and booking services in passenger transport, and telecommunications services. If you sell something to consumers online or handle bookings with payment, you should assume you are in scope.
There is one important exemption: microenterprises providing services, meaning companies with fewer than ten employees and at most two million euros in annual turnover or balance sheet total, are exempt from the service obligations. A plain business-card website without sales or booking does not fall under the EAA in the first place. Even so, don’t lean on the exemption too comfortably: a growing company grows into the obligation, and customers with impairments are already here today.
What ‘accessible’ means in practice
Accessibility means that people with visual, hearing, motor, or cognitive impairments can perceive, operate, and understand the website. The established technical benchmark in Europe is the standard EN 301 549, which for web content essentially points to the internationally used Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) at level AA.
Behind the standard numbers sit very tangible requirements: sufficient colour contrast, real text instead of text baked into images, alternative text for images, operation that works entirely without a mouse, forms with labelled fields and understandable error messages, captions for videos. None of this is exotic; most of it is simply sound craftsmanship.
The most common barriers on typical company websites
From the site audits we do, it is the same items again and again:
- Contrast too weak: light grey text on white looks elegant and is plainly unreadable for many people
- Images without alternative text: a screen reader can only read out what is stored as text
- Forms without labels: placeholder text inside a field disappears while typing and is no substitute for a label
- Mouse-only operation: menus and sliders that cannot be reached with the keyboard
- Vague link texts: five instances of ‘learn more’ on one page say nothing without context
- Missing heading structure: screen reader users navigate by headings; if the hierarchy is decoration rather than structure, that stops working
Where to sensibly start
Step one is an inventory. Automated checkers like Lighthouse in Chrome or the WAVE browser extension find part of the problems, such as contrast issues and missing alt text, for free and within minutes. They are far from finding everything: whether a form is understandable or a navigation usable by keyboard only shows in a hands-on test. Put the mouse away and try to submit an enquiry on your own website using Tab, Enter, and the arrow keys. That test takes ten minutes and tends to be sobering.
Expect the checkers to find something. The WebAIM Million study (2026) automatically tests one million home pages every year and this year found WCAG 2 failures on 95.9% of them, averaging 56 errors per page. The five most frequent error types largely match our list above:
Source: WebAIM Million, 2026
The most important journeys first
Contact, enquiry, purchase, and booking are the paths where barriers cost you customers, and where the legal exposure is greatest. That is where the work starts. Perfection on every subpage is not the first milestone.
Why it pays off even without the obligation
You can treat accessibility as an annoying requirement. Or you can do the sober math: by the European Commission’s count, around 87 million people in the EU live with some form of disability. Add the temporary and situational cases, the broken arm, sunlight on the screen, a video in a noisy café, and, not least, an ageing customer base. Every one of these groups uses an accessible website more easily.
There is also a side effect worth naming: much of what helps screen readers also helps Google. A clean heading structure, alternative texts, and labelled forms double as solid SEO groundwork. The overlap is no coincidence; in both cases the point is that a machine can understand the page.
Build new or retrofit?
Honest answer: retrofitting works, but it has limits. Contrast, alt texts, and link texts can be fixed on almost any website. But if the theme itself ships inaccessible menus and widgets, you are patching symptoms. So with every new build or relaunch, make sure accessibility is built in from the start; that is where it costs the least. With us it is part of the standard for every website, whether or not the client falls under the EAA. We advise against ‘accessibility overlay’ tools that promise compliance via an injected script: they do not fix the problems in the foundation.