Directive (EU) 2019/882 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 17 April 2019

The European Accessibility Act (EAA)

The EAA is the directive that, for the first time, imposes accessibility obligations on the private market across the Union: on hardware manufacturers and on service providers — from banks to online shops. Until then EU law required accessibility only from the public sector. Member states had to transpose it by 28 June 2022 and apply it from 28 June 2025. Poland transposed it with the act of 26 April 2024.

Why it exists

The directive starts from two facts. First: more than 87 million people with disabilities live in the Union and the population is ageing — accessibility is not a niche. Second: 27 different national accessibility regimes fragmented the single market — an ATM accessible in Germany did not have to be accessible in France, and a shop selling in several countries did not know which rules to follow. The EAA harmonises the requirements (recitals 1–7) and grounds them in the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, to which the Union is a party.

Formally the EAA is an internal market harmonisation act (legal basis: art. 114 TFEU), not a social one. That matters in practice: the enforcement mechanisms are modelled on product market surveillance — authorities, inspections, withdrawal from the market, penalties — rather than on individual claims.

What it covers

Products (art. 2(1) of the directive)

• consumer general‑purpose computer hardware systems and their operating systems;
• payment terminals and self‑service terminals: ATMs, ticketing machines, check‑in machines, interactive information terminals;
• consumer terminal equipment used for electronic communications and for access to audiovisual media services;
• e‑readers.

Services (art. 2(2) of the directive)

• electronic communications services;
• services providing access to audiovisual media services;
• elements of air, bus, rail and waterborne passenger transport services: websites, mobile apps, electronic tickets, passenger information, terminals;
• consumer banking services;
• e‑books and dedicated software;
• e‑commerce services.

The last item is the one that touches the most companies. The directive defines e‑commerce broadly: services provided at a distance, by electronic means, at the individual request of a consumer, with a view to concluding a consumer contract (art. 3(30)). That is not only "a shop with a basket" — it is every website on which a consumer concludes a contract. What that means in practice.

What it requires — Annex I

The requirements are worded functionally, not technically. Annex I section III (services) requires, among other things: providing information about the service via more than one sensory channel, in an understandable way, in text formats usable by assistive technologies, in a font of adequate size and contrast; and — the key sentence — "making websites, including the related online applications, and mobile device‑based services […] accessible in a consistent and adequate way by making them perceivable, operable, understandable and robust". Those four adjectives are the four WCAG principles. Section IV adds for e‑commerce: accessibility of identification, security and payment functions, and providing the accessibility information about the products sold where the manufacturer has supplied it.

Annex I section VII contains the functional performance criteria — usage without vision, with limited vision, without perception of colour, without hearing, without vocal capability, with limited manipulation or strength, with limited reach, minimising the risk of photosensitive seizures, with limited cognition, with privacy. The Polish act transcribes them in art. 19.

Presumption of conformity and standards

The directive (art. 15) grants a presumption of conformity to products and services that comply with harmonised standards whose references have been published in the Official Journal of the EU. For websites that standard is EN 301 549 "Accessibility requirements for ICT products and services", whose chapter 9 incorporates WCAG 2.1 level AA in full. One detail deserves care: the version of EN 301 549 currently cited in the Official Journal (V3.2.1 of 2021) is a harmonised standard under the public sector web accessibility directive (2016/2102), not under the EAA. The Commission mandated ETSI to update the standard for the EAA (mandate M/587); ETSI has published the new version, but its citation in the Official Journal under the EAA has not yet happened. Until then the presumption of conformity formally does not operate — which changes nothing about the fact that WCAG 2.1 AA (and sensibly: 2.2 AA) is the only yardstick authorities and courts use. On WCAG and EN 301 549.

Exemptions and transition periods

• Micro‑enterprises (fewer than 10 employees and an annual turnover or balance sheet total of up to €2 million) are exempt from the requirements concerning services (art. 4(5)). For products they have lighter documentation duties.
• Disproportionate burden and fundamental alteration (art. 14): an operator may depart from a specific requirement if it documents an assessment against the criteria in Annex VI. The assessment is available to the authorities and the departure has to be notified.
• Excluded content (art. 2(4)): pre‑recorded time‑based media published before 28 June 2025, office documents published before that date, maps (where address data is available otherwise), third‑party content, archives.
• Service contracts concluded before 28 June 2025 may continue unchanged until they expire, at the latest until 28 June 2030 (art. 32(1)). Note: this concerns contracts, not websites — a shop concluding new contracts today does not benefit from this period.
• Self‑service terminals in use before that date may serve until the end of their economically useful life, at most 20 years (art. 32(2)).

How other countries transposed it

Selling to consumers in several countries? The law of each of them applies — the directive harmonises the requirements, but supervision and penalties are national. The good news is that the technical requirements (EN 301 549 / WCAG) are the same everywhere: one accessible website meets them in all 27 states.

Relationship to other rules

• Directive 2016/2102 (Web Accessibility Directive) — the public sector; in Poland the act of 4 April 2019 on the digital accessibility of public bodies' websites and mobile applications. How they overlap.
• The act of 19 July 2019 on ensuring accessibility for persons with special needs — architecture, communication and information in public bodies; it created the Accessibility Fund, into which fines under the new act are paid (art. 73(5)).
• Consumer law and the GDPR — independent of accessibility, but in practice an accessibility audit covers the same places: terms, forms, consents, payments.