Accessibility Law Now Reaches Your Website in the EU and US. Would It Pass?

Does accessibility law now apply to a business's website? In the European Union (EU), often yes: since 28 June 2025 the European Accessibility Act (EAA) has applied to services provided to consumers, and online shops are among them ¹². In the United States there is no web-specific rule for private businesses, yet the law firm Seyfarth Shaw counted 3,117 website accessibility lawsuits filed in federal court in 2025, a 27% rise on 2024, brought under Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) ³. Two legal systems, one expectation: a website has to be usable by people with disabilities, and 'looks finished' is not the same standard as 'meets the law.'

The target is technical and specific. The EAA states its requirements in terms of outcomes and treats conformity with a harmonised European standard as the route to being presumed compliant ¹. The standard in question is EN 301 549, and the version the European Commission has harmonised so far, under the older Web Accessibility Directive, builds its web requirements on the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 ⁴. A newer version, V4.1.1, was published on 2 September 2026 and moves that baseline to WCAG 2.2, but it carries legal weight only once the Commission cites it in the Official Journal of the EU ⁵. In the United States, the Department of Justice (DOJ) names WCAG as helpful guidance and says no regulation sets detailed technical standards for private businesses, while holding that the ADA applies to everything a public accommodation offers, online included ⁶. WCAG 2.2 extends 2.1 and is backwards compatible with it, so a site built to 2.2 Level AA is aimed at both ⁷.

In concrete terms, WCAG asks that a site work without the assumptions a designer defaults to. All functionality has to be operable by keyboard, for visitors who cannot use a mouse ⁸. Every image or icon that carries meaning needs a text alternative, so a screen reader announces something useful instead of silence ⁸. Text needs a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 against its background, and form errors and status messages have to be exposed so assistive technology can announce them without the visitor hunting for them ⁸. Content has to reflow on a narrow screen without scrolling in two directions, and headings, labels and structure have to be real markup rather than visual styling ⁸. None of this shows in a screenshot, which is why it gets skipped.

A green automated score is not proof of any of it. The W3C's own guidance says some accessibility checks cannot be automated and that evaluation tools can give inaccurate results ⁹. Automated plug-ins that promise WCAG compliance have drawn regulatory attention: in 2025 the US Federal Trade Commission approved a final order barring accessiBe from representing that its automated products can make any website WCAG-compliant without evidence, and requiring it to pay $1 million ¹⁰. Real conformity lives in the markup and the build, and is confirmed by testing the page the way a disabled visitor uses it, not by a scan result or a script layered over a site that was never accessible underneath.

The reason to act is commercial before it is legal. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that 1.3 billion people, about one in six worldwide, experience significant disability ¹¹. An inaccessible checkout or booking form turns those customers away quietly, long before any complaint arrives. The same clean structure also helps machines: Google's Chrome documentation notes that browser agents read a page's accessibility tree, and that missing labels can block both users with visual disabilities and agents from completing a task ¹². Accessibility work therefore feeds directly into search and AI visibility rather than competing with it.

Scope is where many businesses wrongly assume they are exempt. The EAA defines a microenterprise as fewer than 10 persons with an annual turnover or balance sheet total not exceeding EUR 2 million, and microenterprises providing services are exempt from the service requirements ¹. A business that has 10 or more people, or exceeds the financial limit on both measures, is outside that exemption. Even then, any business may argue that compliance would be a disproportionate burden, but it has to document that assessment with evidence and review it every five years ¹². The Act is written around services provided to consumers in the EU, so an online store based elsewhere that sells to EU consumers may be in scope. In the United States, the DOJ's position is that Title III covers businesses open to the public and that a website with inaccessible features can limit access to the goods and services behind it ⁶.

Inside most businesses, nobody owns this. The website was signed off when it looked right on the owner's phone, nobody tested it with a keyboard or a screen reader, and the first sign of a gap is a demand letter or a customer who quietly leaves. Accessibility is cheapest as a build-time decision, with semantic HTML, labelled controls and keyboard-operable components from the first line of code. Retrofitting is possible, but it starts with an honest audit against WCAG, because the failures that cost customers are the ones that never show on the surface.

So is a typical business website ready? If it sells to EU consumers or serves the public in the US and has never been tested with a keyboard and a screen reader, assume it has gaps and test it. This article is general information, not legal advice: whether a specific business is in scope, and what it owes, is a question for a qualified lawyer in the relevant country, and national rules in each EU country add detail on top of the Directive. For related obligations, see how privacy and cookie rules sit alongside this one in Privacy, Cookies, and Accessibility: Three Laws Most Websites Already Break.

Italian DesAIgns builds websites on semantic HTML, labelled controls and keyboard-operable components, which is the foundation WCAG conformance rests on. That is engineering practice, not a legal guarantee, and a claim of conformity for a specific site needs an independent accessibility audit. A good first read on how a current site is structured is the AI visibility check: it scores one page out of 100 on metadata, semantic structure, structured data and crawler access, it does not test accessibility, and the full breakdown comes with a free, no-obligation consultation.