Web accessibility (EAA): One entrance for everyone, required since June 2025.

The law does not cover every website. It covers specific services to consumers, and among them e-commerce: any service provided at a distance, through a website or an app, with a view to concluding a contract with a consumer.

In practice that means the e-shop, but also booking a hotel room online, ordering from a restaurant, buying a ticket for an event. The obligation covers the online sale of any product or service, not only those the law regulates in their own right.

Catalogues only for trade buyers are outside it, because the law protects consumers, and so, as a rule, are websites that only present a business, with no sale or booking.

The only general exemption covers microenterprises providing services: fewer than ten employees, and annual turnover or balance sheet total up to €2 million. Both must hold: a business with twelve people is covered, however small its turnover.

The Directive requires the criteria of Commission Recommendation 2003/361/EC on small and medium-sized enterprises to be genuinely met. If the business belongs to a group or is linked to others, staff and figures are counted together.

A business can also invoke a disproportionate burden or a fundamental alteration of the service. That is not a waiver: it needs a written, reasoned assessment against the law’s criteria, notice to the competent authority, and a new assessment whenever the service changes, and at least every five years. Anyone who received funding to improve accessibility cannot claim a disproportionate burden.

Finally, the transition period to 28 June 2030 concerns products a provider was already using, such as terminals, and consumer contracts signed before 28 June 2025. For websites and e-shops the law provides no extension.

The law asks for websites and apps that are perceivable, operable, understandable and robust. These are the four principles of the W3C’s WCAG guidelines, and they translate into criteria that can be tested one by one.

The measure is the European standard EN 301 549. Version V3.2.1 of 2021, based on WCAG 2.1 level AA, is the one published in the Official Journal of the EU, for the public sector. In September 2026 V4.1.1 was issued: it adopts WCAG 2.2 AA and maps explicitly to the European Accessibility Act. Once it too is published in the Official Journal, meeting it will create a presumption of meeting the law. So the target today is WCAG 2.2 AA.

A provider must also explain publicly, in writing and orally, how the service meets the requirements: in the general terms and conditions or an equivalent document, with a description of the service in accessible formats. This usually takes the form of an accessibility statement, which must itself be accessible.

Compliance is checked by authorities per sector: EETT for electronic communications, the National Council for Radio and Television for audiovisual media, mainly the General Secretariat for Industry for products. Sanctions are administrative and scale with the extent of the breach, the size of the business and its cooperation. Since July 2025, associations representing persons with disabilities can also ask a court to stop a breach.