The EU accessibility act mandates digital accessibility for consumer-facing digital products
Digital accessibility is no longer a courtesy, it’s binding law. Under the EU Accessibility Act (EAA), any business offering digital services or products in the European Union must ensure accessibility for people with disabilities by June 28, 2025. Most companies operating in or selling into the EU fall under this. Geography doesn’t exclude you. Whether your company is based in Berlin, Boston, or Bangalore, if you’re targeting EU consumers with digital products, like a website, app, or software platform, you’re in scope.
This includes more than just traditional screens. Mobile apps, self-service machines like kiosks, ticket terminals, and e-readers are also covered. That means your product design, interface flow, navigation, and error handling all need to be accessible. Internal tools used only by employees may be excluded from the EAA itself, but keep in mind that anti-discrimination and employment rights laws in the EU often require that even those internal systems support accessibility.
Why does this matter? Because after June 28, 2025, failing to comply puts your company at direct legal risk. Depending on the EU member state, this could mean administrative penalties, product removals, or fines. You don’t want your team rolling out a new feature while regulators shut down your access to one of the world’s most valuable markets. Just fix it upstream, the cost of compliance now is lower than the cost of regulatory response later.
For C-suite leaders, this is a strategic call. Don’t silo accessibility as a development detail. Think of it as a design constraint that opens access to tens of millions of EU residents with disabilities, and many millions more who benefit from better usability, like aging customers or users on mobile devices with low bandwidth. It’s broad impact through precision execution.
What wins here is clarity. Build to standard and lead with confidence. The right thing is also the smart thing.
Exemptions for microenterprises and provisions for financial or technical burdens
The EU Accessibility Act doesn’t apply equally to all entities, but it’s close. If your organization is a microenterprise, there’s some breathing room. This category is clearly defined: fewer than 10 employees and an annual turnover or balance sheet under €2 million. If you meet that threshold and your core offerings are services, not products, you may qualify for partial exemption. That said, it’s not a blanket pass.
Manufacturers are held to a higher standard. Regardless of organization size, if you’re building and shipping physical products that interact with users, like e-readers, self-service terminals, or computing devices, you’re expected to meet the accessibility obligations set out in the Act. No exceptions based on headcount or revenue.
There’s also a “disproportionate burden” clause built into the law. In theory, this gives companies a path to argue that compliance presents a serious financial or technical challenge and that the cost outweighs the impact. But in practice, proving that is time-consuming, requires formal documentation, and invites scrutiny. Ignoring compliance on the basis of this clause is a weak strategy, especially when accessible design can be built into workflows, tooling, and product roadmaps with minimal drag when done early.
If you’re in the C-suite, treat these carve-outs as tactical, not strategic. The business case for limiting accessibility to avoid short-term investment doesn’t hold up long. Regulatory changes are continuous, customer expectations are rising, and the optics matter. Leading companies will move first not because they’re forced to, but because broader audience inclusion delivers real, measurable value.
Bottom line: Exceptions exist, but relying on them exposes your business to risk, slows your roadmap, and limits your market. Compliance should be default, and leadership should drive that mindset across product, design, and ops.
The web content accessibility guidelines (WCAG) serve as the primary framework for achieving compliance
The EU Accessibility Act doesn’t dictate a single method for achieving accessibility, it leaves room for each member state to establish its own guidelines. But in practice, there’s one framework that dominates globally and aligns naturally with EAA goals: the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, or WCAG.
WCAG defines how to make digital content more accessible to users with disabilities. It’s structured around four key principles: Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, and Robust. You’ll hear this referred to as the POUR model. These principles aren’t abstract. “Perceivable” means users should be able to see or hear your content. “Operable” means they can navigate it, without needing a mouse. “Understandable” ensures clarity in structure and wording. “Robust” ensures assistive technologies like screen readers work as intended.
The guidelines are also tiered. Level A is the minimum standard. Level AA, what most regulated websites and apps aim for—fixes common accessibility barriers, such as color contrast and link labels. Level AAA is more advanced and harder to meet across complex digital services. You’re not expected to hit AAA unless it’s commercially and technically viable.
For leadership, WCAG should be seen as the baseline. Those four pillars, perception, usability, clarity, and tech compatibility, directly affect how your software performs for a large, often underserved segment of your user base. Implementing these standards adds resilience, consistency, and scalability to your entire product portfolio.
Strong adherence to WCAG principles is also the most defensible position from a regulatory standpoint. If you’re audited or challenged post-mid-2025, showing conformance with Level AA provides tangible proof you’ve met expectations.
Your teams need clarity, especially across design and engineering. Adopt WCAG Level AA as your north star. Build toward it with your tools, documentation, and quality assurance. Then test early and often. There’s no downside to aligning with a standard that’s already recognized, broadly supported, and directly tied to compliance.
Implementing accessibility best practices based on the POUR principles is essential for inclusive digital design
Knowing the standards is one thing. Applying them in product development is what matters. The WCAG POUR model, Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, and Robust, isn’t just theory. You can turn it into specific engineering choices that improve usability for a wide set of users, disabled or not.
Start with “Perceivable.” Your digital content must be accessible through more than just visuals. Every meaningful image should have alternative text. Videos must include captions, and ideally, descriptions for users who can’t hear or see the visuals. Without these, you’re excluding anyone who relies on assistive tools to interpret what’s on the screen.
“Operable” means you need to design for input beyond a mouse or touchscreen. Many users rely entirely on keyboards or screen readers. That requires developers to ensure every interactive component, buttons, links, form fields, is focusable and usable with keyboard navigation. Logical tab order and accessible shortcuts improve speed and efficiency for these users.
“Understandable” comes down to clarity and consistency. Design your interface with predictable behavior. Keep navigation elements in stable positions across all pages. Mark form errors clearly, next to the field, not buried deep in a footer. Always provide helpful error messages that specify what a user should fix. And if you’re using color to indicate an error, make sure there’s accompanying text so screen readers, and users with color blindness, aren’t left guessing.
“Robust” is where code quality matters. Use semantic HTML. Avoid building everything with tags and custom styling. If you’re working on non-standard elements like modals and sliders, you need to integrate accessible roles and ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) attributes properly. Without this layer, screen readers can’t interpret dynamic content, or worse, misinterpret it.
If leadership pushes inclusive design as a default, implementation becomes embedded in the engineering culture. That’s where scale, and future resilience, comes from.
Visual accessibility improvements through scalable text, responsive design, and sufficient color contrast are key
Your visual foundation, text, layout, contrast, plays a key role in how users experience a digital product. It affects legibility, responsiveness, and the ability to navigate without friction, especially for users with low vision or specific environmental limitations.
Start with scalable text. Users need to be able to resize content up to 200%, ideally 400%, without losing functionality or breaking the layout. This requires your design system to avoid fixed units like pixels. Use relative units, em, rem, or percentages, so that content and interfaces scale cleanly. Fixed heights and rigid containers lead to content overflow or clipping, which immediately degrades accessibility.
Next is responsive design. A product that works well on a desktop but breaks on a phone is incomplete. Your layout must adapt across screen sizes and orientations, on high-DPI tablets, landscape smartphones, ultrawide monitors, and more. That includes fluid resizing and maintaining focusable elements, clear labels, and consistent performance across devices. Touch targets need to be accurately spaced and large enough to interact with precision.
Color contrast is another non-negotiable. A significant portion of people have visual impairments or color blindness that affect how they perceive content. If body text blends into the background or links are hard to distinguish from adjacent copy, you’ve failed to meet the basic standard. For normal text, WCAG requires a color contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1. For larger text, 3:1 is acceptable. You don’t need to guess—use contrast checking tools. Incorporate these into your design reviews.
From an executive standpoint, this isn’t an edge-case issue. It’s core usability. A global user base means global variation in abilities, devices, and environments. Getting this right makes your platforms more durable and easier to scale. It reduces churn, cuts support overhead, and demonstrates market maturity. Investing early in visual accessibility avoids forced redesigns and regulatory consequences later.
The teams that plan for inclusive visuals deliver cleaner systems, simpler QA, and more consistent brand experiences. Push for that maturity in the design stack, and you’ll see it reflected in reduced risk and higher engagement.
ARIA attributes increase accessibility where native HTML is insufficient
There’s a clear hierarchy in accessibility development: start with semantic HTML, and then layer enhancements using ARIA when built-in elements can’t meet the functional or structural needs. ARIA, Accessible Rich Internet Applications, helps bridge gaps in interaction when standard HTML falls short, particularly in custom components or dynamic interfaces.
