EAA – The next disruptive Europe wide directive

Starting in June 2025 the European Accessibility Act will be enforced in all EU countries. The EAA is a European directive that will enter in force on June 28th of 2025 for all member states. The directive establishes binding accessibility targets to make a wide range of products and services accessible for people with disabilities.

In Germany the directive has been drafted and announced as the Barrierefreiheitsstärkungsgesetz . So far it is unclear how the EAA will be enforced throughout the EU but it is being compared to the GDPR initiative and thus non compliance will most probably result in legal cases.

Who has to comply?

Among the long list of applicable products and services that are required to comply with the EAA , we at Dinghy are primarily concerned with web based services. Among these are online stores, news publishing websites, websites for sales of products and services and also professional service providers. We are aiming to help business owners adapt their websites to ensure compliance with the EAA.

The value of accessibility for small businesses

While Micro-enterprises (under 10 employees and under 2million Euros of yearly revenue) are not required to comply with the EAA it can still be a great opportunity to broaden their customer base. An estimated 20% of the population of Europe will benefit from web accessibility due to various degrees of limitations from visual impairment to ADHD. These people could turn into new customers if they are able to access a service seamlessly because it offers an accessible experience. This however requires to take a good look at the sites technical setup, its design and content and to rethink or update certain aspects. Often this is a larger project that requires a dedicated team to review the status quo, suggest improvements and coordinate the implementation.

How to assess your websites accessibility

First off, a company should start an internal investigation into the the current state of accessibility. Set up a review with the development team to assess if the required skills to code for accessibility. A good first start can be to ask the dev team to check which WCAG Level of compliance the website is going to score. To ensure that the web based service is accessible it has to comply with the WCAG – the web content accessibility guidelines. Among the three Levels of WCAG, the AA Level is seen as the global standard with about 50 success criteria that have to be met.

Accessibility Audit

While a business can surely start investigating their websites accessibility status by themselves it might simply be above the capacity limit that it can currently direct at this challenge. To identify the missing pieces and then define the required steps to ensure the sites accessibility dinghy offers a Accessibility Audit.

Process

The audit entails a thorough review of the user experience with a set of accessibility tools to simulate specific disabilities and conditions that increase the challenge of consuming content.

Followed by a review of the content for its language, complexity, discoverability and comprehension.

Outcomes

The audit will reveal challenges that your site currently poses to a disabled person and rank them on a scale of severity. According to the magnitude of the challenge we will furthermore offer individual recommendations of how to best solve these challenges within the shortest possible time frame and the smallest possible budget.

Benefits

This will help you to avoid potential legal fees, make your service available to an untapped customer base and generally improve the user experience for all existing customers. A tripple win that might even uncover growth potential that has been waiting to be discovered for a while.

Conclusion

In short, accessibility is not a chore to be taken care of but an opportunity to make your service or content more easily consumable for a larger portion of the population as well. After all outreach and customer acquisition are core metrics for any businesses. While inconvenient at first, these legal requirements should ultimately improve your business and the availability of your services.