The European Accessibility Act (EAA) is now in force, turning digital accessibility from a nice extra into a legal requirement for most Irish businesses that sell or serve customers online in the EU. Getting it right protects you from penalties, and it also makes your site faster, easier to use and open to millions more customers.
Who needs to act
The Act applies broadly to businesses providing digital products and services to consumers in the EU, including:
- Online shops and marketplaces
- Banks and other financial services
- Video-on-demand and streaming platforms
- Public-transport ticketing and journey planners
- E-book stores and online publishers
- Internet, mobile and web-chat providers
There is a small-business exemption: if your company has fewer than ten staff and under two million euro in annual turnover, you fall outside the strict requirement. Even then, making your site accessible still brings clear commercial benefits, so it is worth doing regardless.
What counts as accessible
In plain language, your website or app should:
- Work well with screen-reading software
- Be usable with only a keyboard or a switch device
- Use colour combinations that everyone can read
- Provide text alternatives for images and captions for video
- Give clear, consistent headings, links and error messages
The official reference is an international standard called WCAG. Aim for its AA level and you will be on solid ground.
A five-step plan for non-technical teams
- Take an inventory. List every website, app, PDF and video you show customers, and note who looks after each one.
- Run easy self-checks. Using only the Tab key, make sure you can reach every link and button. Hover over images to see if helpful text appears. Turn on captions in your videos and check the dialogue is covered.
- Fix what is in your control. Add descriptive alt text when you upload images, switch to colours that pass a free contrast checker, and use proper heading styles instead of just bold text so pages have a clear structure.
- Document your effort. Keep a simple record of pages checked, fixes made and before-and-after screenshots. This proves you are making genuine progress.
- Prepare for the experts. When you brief a developer or agency, share your notes and ask what it will cost to fix the rest and how they will prove it passes WCAG AA. Clear notes keep you in control of scope and price.
How Brandstart can help
Accessibility is a natural part of building a good website, not a bolt-on. We can scan and manually test your key pages, hand you a to-do list ranked by impact, then implement the code, theme, plugin and content fixes, aiming for compliance without a costly rebuild wherever possible. We work across WordPress, Shopify, bespoke builds and more, and we can polish colours, spacing and navigation so everything stays on-brand while it passes readability tests.
Building or rebuilding your site is the ideal moment to get accessibility right from the start. Our web design service bakes WCAG AA thinking into every build, so compliance is designed in rather than patched on later.
The takeaway
The Act is here, but treating it as a chore misses the point. An accessible site is a better site for everyone: faster, clearer and open to a far wider audience. Handle it well and compliance becomes a genuine competitive edge, not just a box ticked.