The European Accessibility Act: what e-commerce sites must do now
The European Accessibility Act has applied since 28 June 2025, well beyond the press. What it requires of e-commerce and service sites, and where to start without panicking.
When people talk about digital accessibility, they usually picture public-sector sites and large media outlets. The European Accessibility Act (EAA), in force since 28 June 2025, extends the scope much further. It targets a long list of services sold to consumers: online retail, banking, transport, telecoms, e-books. In other words, a large slice of the commercial web is now covered, and many businesses discovered this rather late. Let us take stock without drama, but without playing it down either.
Who is actually covered
The general rule is simple: if your site sells a product or a service to consumers in the European Union, you probably fall within scope. The text applies to the digital world a logic already familiar from the built environment: a space open to the public must be usable by everyone, including people with visual, hearing, motor or cognitive impairments.
There is a notable exemption for microenterprises that provide services (fewer than ten employees and under two million euros in turnover). But be careful: this exemption does not cover product manufacturers, and it never exempts you from good commercial practice. A checkout that cannot be operated with a keyboard loses sales, exemption or not. The legal framework here is really just a reminder of what user experience already demanded.
What compliance means in practice
The EAA points, in practice, to the WCAG level AA criteria, the same grid used by national accessibility standards. For an e-commerce site, that translates into very concrete points: every product image needs a useful text alternative, order forms must be keyboard-navigable and properly labelled, colour contrasts must stay legible, and content must remain understandable when read by a screen reader.
None of these points is spectacular in isolation. It is their accumulation that discourages people: a catalogue of several thousand product pages is a real project. The good news is that much of it is handled at the template level, once and for all, rather than page by page.
Where audio has a role, and where it does not
Let us be honest here, because the shortcut is tempting. Adding an audio version of your content does not make you EAA-compliant. Compliance runs first through a correctly structured site, one that is keyboard-navigable and readable by assistive technology. Audio replaces neither text alternatives, nor HTML semantics, nor contrast ratios.
That said, for the editorial part of your site (buying guides, blog articles, advice pages, help content), a listenable version brings real comfort to the very audiences the EAA is trying to stop excluding: people tired of screens, with low vision, or with a reading difficulty. We covered this for the press in audio and accessibility, and the logic holds for any content publisher. Audio is an accessibility and comfort complement, not a compliance checkbox. Saying so plainly avoids nasty surprises during an audit.
Where to start without drowning
The worst strategy would be to try to fix everything at once and ship nothing. Better to move by priority. Start with a quick audit, even a rough one, using an automated tool backed by a keyboard test and a screen reader on your critical journeys: search, product page, cart, checkout. Those journeys make or break a sale, and they are the ones any review will look at first.
Then handle shared templates before individual content, because a fix on the product-page template propagates across the whole catalogue. Finally, document what you do: the EAA rewards a sincere, traceable improvement process, not instant perfection. We described the regulatory frame on the media side in what the law now requires, a useful read for grasping the spirit of the text.
Do not confuse legal risk with opportunity
It is easy to experience the EAA as one more constraint. Yet it is a rare case where legal obligation and commercial interest point in the same direction. An accessible site is usable by more people, better indexed, clearer for everyone, including customers with no disability browsing on a phone in poor conditions. Accessibility done well is invisible: it simply feels like quality.
For the editorial layer of your site, if you want to test audio on your content, the feature is detailed on our accessibility and WCAG page.
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