June 30, 2025 · reala11y team

The EAA is now enforceable: what WordPress owners should do

The European Accessibility Act became enforceable on 28 June 2025. What it covers, who's in scope, and a practical, honest checklist for WordPress sites.

The European Accessibility Act (EAA) became enforceable on 28 June 2025. If you run a WordPress site that sells to people in the EU, it is worth understanding what changed — and, just as importantly, what did not.

This is a practical overview, not legal advice. For anything with real exposure, talk to a qualified accessibility professional or a lawyer in the relevant jurisdiction.

What the EAA actually is

The EAA (Directive 2019/882) is an EU directive that sets common accessibility requirements across member states for a defined set of products and services. Each member state has transposed it into its own national law, so the precise wording and the enforcement body vary by country — but the substance is broadly aligned.

It is not a “website law” in the way people sometimes assume. It targets specific categories, including:

• E-commerce services (selling products or services online to consumers)
• Banking and consumer payment services
• E-books and dedicated reading software
• Transport ticketing and travel sites and apps
• Electronic communications services

If your WordPress site is a brochure for a local business with no online transactions, you are likely outside the core scope. If it has a checkout, a booking flow, or a paid login, you are much more likely to be in scope.

The microenterprise carve-out

The EAA exempts microenterprises (fewer than 10 staff and annual turnover or balance-sheet total at or below 2 million euros) that provide services. Note the wording: that services exemption does not extend to companies making products under the Act. Do not treat “we’re small” as an automatic pass — confirm against the law your country actually transposed.

The standard underneath it

In practice, conformance is measured against EN 301 549, the European accessibility standard, which incorporates WCAG for web content. So the day-to-day work is the familiar work: meeting WCAG success criteria.

A few dates worth keeping straight:

• WCAG 2.1 — published in 2018.
• WCAG 2.2 — a W3C Recommendation since 5 October 2023, adding criteria such as Target Size (Minimum) at level AA.

Targeting WCAG 2.2 AA is a sensible baseline. If you want a plain-language breakdown of the criteria, our WCAG 2.2 guide walks through them.

This is part of a broader pattern

The EAA did not arrive in isolation. In the US, the DOJ issued an ADA Title II web rule in April 2024 setting WCAG 2.1 AA expectations for state and local government. And on 21 April 2025, the FTC entered a final order against the overlay vendor accessiBe — a $1,000,000 penalty — over claims that its automated tool made sites WCAG compliant.

The throughline: regulators are tightening, and “we installed a widget” is not holding up. Which leads to the practical part.

What WordPress owners should actually do

A reasonable, honest sequence:

1. Confirm whether you’re in scope. Online sales, banking, ticketing, e-books → probably yes. Check your country’s transposed law.
2. Audit against WCAG 2.2 AA. Use automated scanning to surface the mechanical issues fast — missing alt text, low contrast, broken heading order, unlabelled form fields, links that go nowhere descriptive.
3. Fix at the source. Correct the underlying HTML, not a visitor-side layer bolted on at runtime. See how reala11y works.
4. Do manual review for the rest. Keyboard-only navigation, screen-reader testing, focus order, meaningful sequence — these need a human.
5. Document your status honestly. An accessibility statement that reflects your actual state is more defensible than a compliance badge you cannot back up.

A word on automated tools (including ours)

Automated tooling detects roughly 30–40% of WCAG issues by criteria. It is excellent at the high-volume, mechanical failures and weak at judgment calls — like whether your alt text is meaningful, or whether your link text makes sense out of context.

So automated scanning gets you moving and clears the backlog of obvious defects. It does not, on its own, make a site conformant, and any vendor — us included — who tells you a single tool does is selling you the accessiBe story again. reala11y is built to fix code-level issues and pair them with manual review, not to paper over them with an overlay.

Honest takeaway

The EAA raises the floor, and the direction of travel is clear. But there is no button — no plugin, no widget, no AI — that makes your site conformant and keeps the lawyers away. The durable move is the unglamorous one: scan, fix the real code, review the rest by hand, and describe where you stand truthfully. The deadline has already passed; the work is what matters now.