The European Accessibility Act and your website

Which services are in scope

Article 2(2) covers these services when they are provided to consumers after 28 June 2025. A website or app counts when it is how the service is delivered:

• E-commerce services.
• Consumer banking services.
• Electronic communications services, other than machine-to-machine transmission.
• Services providing access to audiovisual media services.
• Air, bus, rail and waterborne passenger transport: websites, mobile services, electronic tickets, real-time travel information and interactive terminals. For urban, suburban and regional transport, only interactive self-service terminals are covered.
• E-books and the dedicated software used to read them.

Article 2(1) separately covers products placed on the market after that date, such as consumer computers and their operating systems, payment terminals, ATMs, ticketing and check-in machines, and e-readers.

Exemptions and exceptions

What standard shows conformity

The Directive's requirements are functional. Under Article 15, meeting a harmonised standard whose reference is published in the Official Journal of the EU gives a presumption of conformity. For websites the relevant European standard is EN 301 549, whose web clauses follow WCAG.

As of September 2026 that is in transition. EN 301 549 V4.1.1, published in September 2026, was prepared to support the Act and aligns its web clauses with WCAG 2.2. According to the EU's AccessibleEU Centre, V3.2.1, which follows WCAG 2.1, remains the reference until V4.1.1 is cited in the Official Journal. In practice that makes WCAG 2.1 Level AA the floor today, and the nine criteria WCAG 2.2 added the sensible thing to fix now.

Enforcement and penalties

Each Member State designates the authorities that check services and handle complaints (Article 23), must let consumers and organisations take action under national law (Article 29), and sets penalties that are "effective, proportionate and dissuasive" (Article 30). The amounts therefore differ by country. Three examples from national sources:

• Germany (BFSG § 37): fines of up to EUR 100,000 for the offences listed in § 37(1) nos. 1 and 7 to 10, and up to EUR 10,000 for the others.
• France: the DGCCRF enforces, and states fines of EUR 7,500 per breach, which can accumulate.
• Italy: AgID's March 2026 guidelines state fines of up to 5% of turnover for service providers whose average turnover over three years exceeds EUR 500 million.

What an automated scan can tell you

No scanner can certify conformity with the Act. By our own estimate, automated testing reliably covers roughly 30 to 40% of WCAG 2.2 criteria; the rest, such as whether alternative text is meaningful or a flow makes sense with a screen reader, needs a person. What a scan does well is find the failures it can measure on every page, every time, and show you where the gaps are.

On the Team plan and above, Accessibility Pro reports carry a Compliance tab that maps findings to EN 301 549 V3.2.1 clauses and marks each criterion as supported, partial, not supported or not tested, so the criteria automation cannot see are named rather than counted as passes. See the compliance reporting overview and the field audit of how the scanner performs on real sites.