European Accessibility Act
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The European Accessibility Act (EAA) is a new European directive designed to standardize accessibility among all European countries. This directive applies to all private companies that sell to EU customers, regardless of the country the company is based in. If you have customers in Europe, you must comply with the EAA.
Deadline is June 28, 2025.
You have 9 months and 14 days left to comply with the European Accessibility Act.
Start now and you'll have plenty of time. The first step is to identify the current status of your websites.
Get a site-wide validation report of your sites using Rocket Validator to get a list of current accessibility issues.
What You Need To Know About the EAA
Frequently Asked Questions about the European Accessibility Act
We have compiled the most frequently asked questions about the European Accessibility Act (also known as EAA and Directive EU 2019/882) to assist you in complying with this directive. Please use this information as a guide, not as legal advice.
The European Accessibility Act took effect in April 2019, and EU member states were required to transpose the directive into national laws by June 2022.
The compliance deadline for businesses and organizations is June 28th, 2025.
The European Accessibility Act focuses on private sector organizations selling products or services to customers that live in Europe, regardless of the country the organization is based on. If you have customers in Europe, you must comply with the EAA.
No. Even if your company is based outside Europe, if it has customers in Europe, it must comply with the European Accessibility Act.
Yes. The requirements and obligations of the EAA do not apply to microenterprises providing services within the scope of the EAA – whereby microenterprise means an enterprise which employs fewer than 10 people and which has an annual turnover not exceeding EUR 2 million or an annual balance sheet total not exceeding EUR 2 million.
Penalties for non-compliance with the EAA vary by country, as each EU member state is responsible for enforcing the directive. Non-compliance can result in fines, legal actions, and reputational damage.
The accessibility requirements of this Directive should be aligned to the requirements of Directive (EU) 2016/2102.Directive (EU) 2016/2102, also known as the Web Accessibility Directive, states that:
The four principles of accessibility are: perceivability, (...) operability, (...) understandability, (...) and robustness, (...). Those principles of accessibility are translated into testable success criteria, such as those forming the basis of the European standard EN 301 549 V1.1.2.
EN 301 459 V1.1.2 references the WCAG 2.0 standard, and in version 2.1.2 it directly referenced WCAG 2.1 AA.
To get ahead of the curve, we however suggest that you implement the latest version of WCAG available, at the moment of this writing, WCAG 2.2.
According to axe-core, the accessibility checker used in Rocket Validator, up to 57% of WCAG issues can be discovered automatically on average.Manual testing is always necessary to ensure the accessibility of your websites. Ultimately, the best option for testing web accessibility is to combine automated and manual testing.
Rocket Validator integrates axe-core and W3C HTML Validator Nu checking into an automated site-wide validation scanner.
Digital accessibility monitoring for busy developers
Try Rocket Validator and find Accessibility and HTML issues in your large sites, in seconds.
Multi-page validation
Get your site automatically scanned for accessibility and HTML issues with just one click.
Our web crawler will validate thousands of web pages from your sites and include all the issues in a simplified report.
HTML and CSS checking
Ensure your site is free of markup issues with our integration with the W3C's Nu HTML Checker.
Get a comprehensive report of W3C HTML and CSS issues for your site in seconds.
Accessibility Checks
Our integration with the axe-core accessibility engine will check your web pages for accessibility issues.
With axe-core, you can find on average 57% of WCAG issues automatically.
Summary Reports
Cut out the clutter and focus on the most important HTML and accessibility issues on your sites.
Summary reports group together common issues on your site in an easy-to-understand format.
Scheduled Reports
Set up continuous monitoring for your web sites with a daily, weekly or monthly schedule
We'll automatically run the reports for you and send the results to your inbox.
API Integration
Easily integrate site validation data into your existing workflows or chart dashboards.
The Rocket Validator API lets you manage your site validation reports via a standard JSON API.
Mobile Testing
Your sites don't look the same on a laptop, an iPhone, a Galaxy Note or a Kindle Fire.
Accessibility reports will emulate the selected device viewport, scale factor and user agent.
Ready for Teamwork
Reports can easily be shared with anyone in your team, so everyone stays on the same page.
Guest accounts allow you to give access and monitor your collaborators.
Track your Improvement
Based on daily data from your reports, you'll get stats for your checked domains.
Charts and stats can be easily shared with anyone in our outside your team.