Does the European Accessibility Act apply to you? Four questions, in order

Published 21 August 2026.

Most articles answer this with one number: ten employees, two million euro. That number is real and it is the last question, not the first. Asking it first is how companies conclude they are covered when they are not, and how others conclude they are safe when they are not.

Four questions, in the order that actually decides it.

1. Is what you provide on the list?

The EAA does not cover the whole economy. It covers a specific list of products and services.

The services in scope are consumer banking, electronic communications, e-commerce, e-books and their dedicated software, services providing access to audiovisual media services, and transport passenger services including e-ticketing and travel information.

The Act also reaches the answering of 112 emergency calls. That one sits on the emergency call centres rather than on anyone selling to the public, so it is not a question you have to answer here.

One entry does far more work than the others, and it is why this question settles less than it looks. E-commerce is not a sector. Recital 43 of the directive says the e-commerce obligations apply to the online sale of any product or service.

So the question is not whether dentistry or construction appears on the list. Neither does. It is whether you sell online at all — and then, in question 2, to whom. A construction firm with a brochure site and a manufacturer selling through distributors are outside the scope because nobody buys from them on the web — not because their trade is missing from the list. A practice that takes bookings and payment through its own site is doing e-commerce whatever is written on the door.

Having a website does not make you an EAA service provider. Selling through one can.

Note the word service. Products have their own list: computers and operating systems, payment terminals, ATMs, ticketing machines, smartphones, e-readers, routers. If you make one of those, you are on a different path through this article and the microenterprise exemption below does not help you.

2. Is your customer a consumer?

This is the question that decides most cases, and the one most guides skip.

E-commerce services are defined in Article 3(30) as services provided at a distance, through websites and mobile device-based services, by electronic means and at the individual request of a consumer, with a view to concluding a consumer contract.

Those criteria are cumulative. Every one has to be true.

And consumer has a fixed meaning: a natural person acting for purposes outside their trade, business, craft or profession.

So a genuinely B2B-only platform is generally outside the scope. If everything you sell goes to companies, under business contracts, to people acting in their professional capacity, the e-commerce limb does not catch you.

The trap in mixed models

“We are B2B” is a description of your sales team, not of your website.

The definition turns on who the counterparty is and what contract is being concluded — not on how you describe your market. A platform that sells to businesses but has an open sign-up flow that never verifies business status, or a booking system a private individual can complete, is where “we are B2B” stops being obviously true.

I am not going to tell you those cases are definitely caught, because that is a question for a lawyer looking at your actual contracts and your actual sign-up flow. What I will say is that this is the point where the answer stops being automatic, and if your response to “can a private individual buy from us?” is “probably not, I think”, that is the thing worth resolving before you decide you are out of scope.

3. Are you a microenterprise?

Now the famous number.

A microenterprise employs fewer than 10 people and has an annual turnover or an annual balance sheet total not exceeding €2 million.

Read that or carefully, because it is the word people talk themselves out of the exemption with. The headcount and the money are separate tests and you have to pass both, but the money test is satisfied by either figure. Turnover of €3 million does not disqualify you if your balance sheet total is under two.

Microenterprises providing services are exempt from the accessibility requirements. That is the exemption in Article 4(5), and it is real.

Two things it does not do:

It does not exempt product manufacturers. A five-person company making e-readers is not off the hook, though the paperwork burden on it is lighter.

It does not exempt you from everything else. Other law still applies — national disability legislation, and ordinary consumer protection rules about misleading claims. And if you build or run something for a public body, the Web Accessibility Directive binds that body rather than you, which is not the relief it sounds like: it arrives in your procurement contract instead. “We are a microenterprise” is an answer to one question.

If you clear the headcount test and either money test, and you provide services, you are outside the EAA’s service obligations. Building an accessible service is still worth doing. It is just not, in your case, a legal requirement under this directive.

The numbers above are the directive’s. Your country’s may not match.

On 6 May 2026 the tribunal judiciaire de Lille held that Auchan E-Commerce was under no accessibility obligation at all — not because it is a microenterprise, which it plainly is not, but because the judge read the obligation through Article 47 of the French law of 11 February 2005, which carries a €250 million turnover threshold, rather than through the directive’s figures. The court accepted that the site was not accessible and dismissed the claim anyway.

apiDV and Droit Pluriel, who brought it, have appealed to the cour d’appel de Douai and call the reading a serious error of European law.

File that under unsettled, not under good news. It is a first-instance decision, it is on appeal, and it binds one member state. What it demonstrates is the line at the bottom of this article, which is easy to read as a formality: the directive is not what binds you. Your country’s transposition of it is, and the two can diverge by two orders of magnitude.

4. When?

The deadline was 28 June 2025, and enforcement started immediately. Nine days later the disability organisations apiDV and Droit Pluriel sent formal notices to Auchan, Carrefour, E.Leclerc and Picard over inaccessible online shopping. Sweden’s telecoms regulator opened the first market surveillance that October. The French cases reached court in November.

The first decision came on 4 June 2026, when the tribunal judiciaire de Caen gave Carrefour six months to make its website and mobile app accessible, with a penalty accruing for every day it overshoots.

But the directive contains transitional provisions that change the answer for a lot of businesses, and they are barely discussed.

Service contracts concluded before 28 June 2025 may continue without alteration until they expire, and no longer than five years from that date — so at the latest 28 June 2030.

Products lawfully used to provide services before that date may keep being used until 28 June 2030.

Self-service terminals lawfully in use before 28 June 2025 may continue to the end of their economically useful life, up to twenty years from entry into use. This one the directive leaves to each member state to grant or not, so check that yours took it. Where it did, the ticket machine on the platform is not illegal tomorrow.

Read those carefully rather than hopefully. They cover existing contracts and existing hardware. They do not cover the new website you launched last month, and they do not cover a new consumer signing up today.

The disproportionate burden defence, and why it is not a shortcut

Article 14 lets a provider argue that compliance would impose a disproportionate burden. This gets quoted as an escape hatch. Read what it actually costs you:

• The assessment must be carried out against the criteria in Annex VI, not asserted.
• It must be documented, and the records kept for five years after the service was last provided.
• It must be reassessed at least every five years, and sooner than that if you alter the service or an authority asks you to.
• A copy goes to the authority on request.
• And — the part that surprises people — when you rely on it, you must send information to that effect to the relevant authority. It is not a defence you keep in a drawer until challenged. Relying on it means telling somebody you are relying on it.

“It was too expensive” asserted after the fact, with no documentation, is not the defence. The documented, notified, periodically renewed assessment is the defence.

Doing that properly is frequently more work than fixing the site.

If the answer is yes

Start by finding out where you actually stand, which is cheaper than most people expect.

npx curbcut https://example.com --crawl --statement

Or check a page in your browser with nothing installed. Findings come back as EN 301 549 clauses rather than rule names, ranked by what a regulator asks about first rather than by how loudly a rule engine complains.

Then read what an accessibility statement actually has to contain, because the template most people copy was written for a different directive.

If the answer is no

Then you have just saved a budget cycle, and I would rather you learned that here than after buying something.

Plenty of the accessibility industry is selling urgency to companies that are out of scope. If you sell only to businesses, or you are a microenterprise providing services, or you sell nothing to consumers online and are on none of the other lists, you can put this down.

The parts worth doing anyway — labelled form fields, sane contrast, a site that works by keyboard — are cheap, and they make you money by not turning customers away. That is a better reason than fear.

I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice. The EAA is a directive, which means what binds you is your own member state’s transposition of it, and those differ. Read yours, or ask somebody qualified to.