What Is the EAA?

The European Accessibility Act, officially Directive (EU) 2019/882, is a law that sets common accessibility requirements for products and services across all 27 EU member states. It was originally proposed in 2011, adopted as a directive in April 2019, and became enforceable on 28 June 2025.

In simple terms: if you sell digital products or services to people in the European Union, those products and services must be usable by people with disabilities. That includes websites, apps, e-commerce platforms, banking services, and much more.

The EAA was designed to solve a practical problem. Before it existed, each EU country had its own accessibility rules — or none at all — making it difficult for businesses to operate consistently across borders and leaving millions of disabled people without reliable access to everyday products and services.

Around 101 million people in the EU — roughly one in four adults — live with some form of disability. Many more experience temporary or situational accessibility barriers, from a broken arm to using a phone in bright sunlight. Before the EAA, there was no consistent requirement for private-sector businesses to make their products and services accessible.

The EU already had the Web Accessibility Directive (2016), which required public-sector websites to be accessible. But that only covered government and public-body websites. The vast majority of everyday digital interactions — online shopping, banking, booking transport, reading e-books — were unregulated.

The EAA fills that gap. It reflects the EU's obligations under the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and forms a central part of the EU Strategy for the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (2021–2030).

At its core, the EAA requires that products and services are Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, and Robust — the four principles known as POUR, and the same foundational principles that underpin WCAG.

The EAA does not reinvent the wheel. It references the European harmonised standard EN 301 549, which in turn incorporates WCAG 2.2. Meeting WCAG 2.2 Level AA creates a presumption of conformity — if your digital products meet that standard, you are presumed to comply with the EAA.

Beyond digital content, the EAA also requires:

• Products to be designed and produced for maximum use by people with disabilities
• Accessible packaging, instructions, and labelling
• Accessibility statements explaining how products and services meet the requirements
• Feedback mechanisms allowing users to report accessibility barriers

Behind every success criterion and legal requirement is a real person trying to do something ordinary: buy groceries online, check their bank balance, book a train ticket, or read an e-book.

For someone who is blind, it means being able to use a screen reader to navigate a shopping website without hitting unlabelled buttons or images with no descriptions. For someone with dyslexia, it means being able to adjust text spacing and read content written in clear language. For someone with a motor disability, it means being able to use a keyboard instead of a mouse. For someone who is Deaf, it means having captions on videos.

At Calling All Minds, we know this is not abstract. Our team includes people with lived experience of disability and neurodiversity. We built this guide — and our products — because we understand what it feels like to be excluded by design that simply did not think about people like us.