The accessibility deadline that already passed
By Allan Leone on
The European Accessibility Act became enforceable in June 2025. Most product teams I speak to still treat accessibility as a backlog item, and the penalties in some member states are calculated as a share of turnover.
The European Accessibility Act became enforceable on 28 June 2025. It applies to digital products and services sold to consumers in the EU, and it points at EN 301 549, which in practice means WCAG.
The part that tends to get attention is the penalty structure, because it is set per member state and some of it is proportional. Italy calculates up to a share of annual turnover. Spain and the Netherlands run to seven figures. Others are smaller but come with orders that can restrict market access.
I am not a lawyer and this is not advice. But the deadline is behind us, not ahead, and a lot of teams are still planning for it as though it were upcoming.
Why the usual argument failed
Accessibility has been argued on ethical grounds for two decades and mostly lost budget fights, because the benefit was diffuse and the cost was immediate.
What changed is not that the ethical argument got better. It is that there is now a number attached to ignoring it, and numbers move roadmaps in a way that principles have not.
The overlap nobody planned
Here is the useful part if you are trying to get this funded. Almost everything required for accessibility is also what makes an interface usable by an AI agent.
- Semantic structure rather than styled divs, so the thing can be parsed at all.
- Labels that describe purpose rather than appearance.
- State exposed in the markup rather than carried in colour or position.
- Errors that name the constraint and the valid alternative.
Two budgets, one body of work. If the compliance argument is not landing with your leadership, the agent-readiness argument sometimes does, and it buys the same thing.
What an audit actually finds
Automated tooling catches roughly a third of real issues, and teams routinely mistake a clean automated report for compliance. The things it misses are the ones that matter: focus order that makes no sense, a modal you cannot escape, a custom component that announces nothing, an error only signalled by a red border.
Where to start
- Complete your product's main task using only the keyboard. Whatever you cannot finish is your priority list, and it takes twenty minutes to produce.
- Run an automated scan for the cheap wins, then treat the clean report as the beginning rather than the result.
- Check whether you sell to consumers in the EU. If yes, this is a compliance question with a date that has passed, not a quality question.
- Fund it as one piece of work covering both accessibility and agent-readiness. It is the same code either way.
Tags: accessibility, product, compliance