Gabriel Espinheira
In June 2025, one subject line kept landing in European founders' inboxes: Is your website European Accessibility Act compliant? Fines up to €100,000. If you run an owner-operated business with fewer than ten people, most of those emails were selling a fix for a problem you probably don't have. The European Accessibility Act came into force on 28 June 2025, and it exempts the smallest businesses from its rules for online services. So the panic missed most of the people it reached. Here is the part the emails skipped: being legally exempt is not the same as your website being fine. Roughly one in four of your potential customers can't use a site built the way most sites are built. They don't file complaints. They leave.
TL;DR: The European Accessibility Act took effect on 28 June 2025, but businesses with fewer than 10 staff and under €2M turnover are exempt from its rules for online services. Exemption removes the legal risk, not the commercial one. An inaccessible site quietly turns away around one in four customers, and the search engines that rank you read the page the same way they do.
Does the European Accessibility Act actually apply to your business?
Probably not, if you're small. The Act exempts microenterprises, meaning businesses with fewer than 10 employees and an annual turnover or balance sheet under €2 million, from its accessibility rules for services, and an online shop counts as a service. Both conditions have to be true. And the exemption covers services, not products: if you make or sell a physical product like an e-reader or a payment terminal, size doesn't save you (per Greenberg Traurig's EAA compliance guidance, July 2025).
When the Act does apply, it doesn't ask for anything exotic. It points to the European standard EN 301 549, which adopts WCAG 2.1 at Level AA as the bar for websites. Penalties are set by each EU country and reach six figures in several of them, with the first cases filed in France in late 2025.
Two things stop the exemption being the free pass it looks like. It's a moving line: cross ten people or €2 million and it's gone, which quietly makes the site you shipped today non-compliant tomorrow. And it's a defence you're meant to document, not assume. If you're a founder about to raise and hire, you're building toward the day the exemption expires, not away from it.
Why 'exempt' is a legal answer, not a business one
About one in four adults in the EU lives with some form of disability, roughly 90 million people, according to Eurostat. That is more potential customers than the entire population of Germany, and a share of them are on your site right now, trying to give you money.
What they do when the site fights back is well documented. The UK's Click-Away Pound report found that 71% of disabled users who hit a barrier simply leave for a site that works, rather than report the problem, taking an estimated £17.1 billion in abandoned spend across UK retail in 2019. The figure is British and a few years old; the behaviour is not. Nobody emails you to say your checkout was unusable. They buy from whoever's checkout worked.
This is the same failure SharpHaw writes about constantly, wearing a different hat. A site that gets traffic and produces no leads, and a site that turns away shoppers who can't read the buttons, are the same problem measured from two ends. An exemption is a reason a court leaves you alone. It is not a reason a customer stays. If you've ever run a conversion audit on your own site and found the leak was quieter than you expected, this is another one hiding in the same place.
The accessibility failures that are also conversion failures
In February 2025, WebAIM tested the home pages of the top one million websites and found detectable accessibility failures on 94.8% of them, an average of 51 separate errors per page. Six recurring issues caused 96% of them, led by low-contrast text (on 79.1% of pages) and missing image descriptions (55.5%). Most of these are not disability edge cases. They are everyday usability problems that happen to hurt disabled users first and everyone else second.
Take the top one. Low-contrast text, the pale grey on white that looks refined on a designer's monitor, is unreadable to anyone over 50, and to your whole mobile audience the moment they step outside into daylight. You didn't build an accessibility problem. You built a page half your visitors have to squint at.
The rest pay off twice. A screen reader announces an unlabelled button as "button", so an "add to cart" the software can't name is one that assistive tech can't press. The same missing text is exactly what Google reads when it tries to understand the page. Alt text on your product photos, headings in a sensible order, descriptive links, real buttons instead of clickable coloured boxes: that is one set of work serving two audiences, screen readers and search crawlers, who happen to want the same things. Accessibility and SEO are not separate projects. They're the same fixes with two reasons to do them.
Skip the accessibility overlay. It's the cookie-banner mistake again
The tempting fix is the one those June emails were selling: a single line of JavaScript, an "accessibility overlay" or widget, that promises instant compliance. Treat it the way you'd treat any one-line patch for a structural problem. Overlays sit on top of the site and try to correct accessibility at runtime. They routinely miss the failures that matter, sometimes interfere with the assistive technology they claim to help, and have themselves been named in accessibility lawsuits. A widget is a checkbox. It is not the work.
You've seen this shape before. It's the cookie banner that became the most expensive checkbox on the site, a script bolted on to make a compliance worry disappear from view without solving it. Real accessibility lives in the markup: the headings, the labels, the contrast, the focus order. None of it can be sprinkled on afterwards by a vendor who has never seen your build.
The fixes worth doing whether the law applies or not
You don't need a compliance project or a redesign. You need an afternoon and the browser you already have. Run your key pages against this list before you spend anything:
- Contrast. Put your main pages through a free contrast checker and fix any body text that fails the 4.5:1 ratio. It's the most common failure on the web and the easiest win on this list.
- Labels and buttons. Every form field gets a visible label; every button says what it does. Use real
<button>and<a>elements, not styled<div>s that only look clickable. - Alt text. Describe meaningful images and leave decorative ones empty. Your product photos are SEO surface as well as screen-reader surface.
- Keyboard. Tab through the page with the mouse untouched. If you can't reach the menu, the checkout, or the contact form, neither can a chunk of your visitors, and your contact form is where enquiries already quietly die.
- Visible focus. You should always be able to see where the keyboard is on the page. If the outline got switched off for looking "cleaner", switch it back on.
- Headings in order. One H1, then H2s that name each section, the same structure that helps search engines and AI assistants read you.
Build these in now, while the site is small and the exemption still covers you. Retrofitting accessibility into a grown site is the expensive version of the same job. That's why we treat it as continuous work on a conversion-first website rather than a one-off audit, and price it that way, on the Plans page, instead of as a project.
Frequently asked questions
Does the European Accessibility Act apply to small businesses?
Usually not. Microenterprises, meaning businesses with under 10 staff and under €2 million in turnover or balance sheet, are exempt from the Act's rules for online services, and both conditions must be met. The exemption doesn't cover physical products, and it disappears the moment you grow past either threshold.
What accessibility standard does the EAA expect?
The Act points to the European standard EN 301 549, which adopts the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 at Level AA for websites. In practice, meeting WCAG 2.1 AA is what "accessible" means for a site under the Act. An update expected in 2026 moves the reference to WCAG 2.2.
What happens if my website isn't accessible?
If the Act applies to you, penalties are set by each EU country and reach six figures in several, with the first cases filed in France in late 2025. If you're exempt there's no fine, but an inaccessible site still loses the roughly one in four customers who can't use it, and no exemption refunds that.
Do accessibility overlay widgets make my site compliant?
No. Overlay widgets patch a site at runtime and consistently miss the failures that matter. Some degrade the assistive technology they claim to support, and they've been named in accessibility lawsuits. Real fixes live in the site's own code, not in a script pasted on top of it.
What to do next
Most owner-operated European businesses can close the European Accessibility Act tab. The law probably doesn't apply to you, and no amount of email urgency changes that. What doesn't go away is the customer using a screen reader, the one zoomed in on a bright pavement, the one tabbing through your checkout without a mouse, and the search engine reading your page exactly the way they do. Fix the handful of things that serve all of them and you've done conversion work that happens to be compliant too.
Book a 30-min call. Bring your worst-performing page, leave with a fix-it list, and we'll read it the way your customers do.
