The European Accessibility Act and news websites: what applies since June 2025
The European Accessibility Act has applied since 28 June 2025. What Directive (EU) 2019/882 means for news websites, and where audio fits in.
Since 28 June 2025, Directive (EU) 2019/882, better known as the European Accessibility Act, applies across the European Union. It sets common accessibility requirements for a range of products and services sold to consumers, and unlike earlier European rules that mainly concerned the public sector, it reaches private companies. That includes publishers, because most news sites are also e-commerce operations: they sell subscriptions online.
For a newsroom decision-maker, the useful questions are practical ones. Does this apply to my site? What does "accessible" mean concretely? And where should we start, given that nobody has a spare quarter to dedicate to it? This article gives the broad lines. One caveat before anything else: the directive is transposed into national law by each member state, obligations vary with your activities and your company's situation, and some exemptions and transition arrangements exist. Nothing here replaces a conversation with your legal counsel, and we recommend having that conversation.
What the directive actually covers
The European Accessibility Act does not regulate "websites" in general. It lists specific products and services, and the entry that matters most for publishers is e-commerce services. If readers can buy a subscription, a day pass or an archive article on your site, that purchase journey is a service covered by the directive: the requirement is that consumers with disabilities can find the offer, understand it, complete the payment and manage their account like anyone else.
The requirements themselves are functional: information must be perceivable, the interface operable, the whole thing understandable and robust enough to work with assistive technologies such as screen readers. In practice, conformity is usually assessed against the European standard EN 301 549, which itself references the WCAG guidelines familiar to web teams. Enforcement is national: each member state has designated authorities and defined its own penalties, so the exposure differs from country to country. Resist the temptation to copy a fine amount from a LinkedIn post; check what applies in your market.
What this means for a news site, concretely
Start from the reader journey rather than the legal text. A visitor with low vision, a motor impairment or dyslexia should be able to: navigate your site with a keyboard alone, read your pages with sufficient contrast and resizable text, understand your images through alternative text, fill in your registration and payment forms with properly labelled fields, and get through the paywall without hitting a dead end. The subscription funnel deserves priority, because it is the part of the site most clearly within the directive's e-commerce scope, and because an inaccessible checkout also loses you paying subscribers with no disability at all.
An accessibility statement, describing what conforms and what does not yet, is standard practice and required in several national transpositions. It also forces the useful exercise of actually auditing your site.
Where audio fits, and where it does not
An audio version of every article, with a synchronised read-along text highlighted as the voice progresses, is a concrete answer to real needs: readers with low vision, readers with dyslexia, readers for whom a dense page of text is a barrier for any other reason. The combination matters more than the audio alone. Listening while following the highlighted text supports comprehension in a way neither format does by itself, which is why we treat the two as one feature. We detail the reader-side case in audio accessibility for news sites.
Be equally clear about the limit: adding audio does not, on its own, make a site compliant with the directive. Conformity is assessed on the whole service, checkout included, and no single feature settles it. What audio does is address the substance of the requirement (making your content perceivable in more than one form) with something readers notice on day one, while the longer accessibility work proceeds. Our approach to building the player itself for keyboard and screen-reader use is described on our accessibility page.
Where to start
Four steps, in order. First, audit your site against EN 301 549 or WCAG, with the subscription funnel first in line. Second, fix the blocking issues in that funnel: forms, focus order, contrast, payment. Third, publish an accessibility statement and keep it honest. Fourth, have legal counsel confirm your scope, your national obligations and whether any exemption applies to your situation, rather than assuming. Audio with synchronised text can run in parallel from week one: it is the rare accessibility improvement your readers will thank you for out loud.
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