The European Accessibility Act and your website: who is in scope and what to do

Two dates matter more than any checklist. Since 28 June 2025 the European Accessibility Act has applied to a defined list of services sold to consumers in the EU, and e-commerce is on that list. In September 2026 the underlying European standard was updated to adopt WCAG 2.2. Most small business websites have responded to neither.

The reasonable question is not "is accessibility good?" It is narrower and more practical: does the Act actually apply to my website, and if it does, what is the smallest credible first project?

This article answers that question for owners of small sites: a hotel, a restaurant, an online shop, or a professional-service practice. It is not legal advice, and boundary cases should be confirmed. It is a way to decide whether to act and where to start.

What the European Accessibility Act covers, and what it does not

The Act is a directive, Directive (EU) 2019/882, which each member state transposes into national law. It sets accessibility requirements for a list of products and services judged most important for people with disabilities and most likely to differ across countries. The service list includes banking, transport, e-books, telecommunications and e-commerce.

That last item is the one that matters to most small businesses. The Polish implementing act defines e-commerce services as services offered or provided at a distance, through websites and mobile devices, electronically and at the individual request of a consumer, in order to conclude a contract. If a guest can hold a room, book a table or buy a product on your site, you are selling a service online.

Two clarifications prevent expensive misreading:

• Public-sector rules are separate. The Web Accessibility Directive has applied to public bodies for years. The European Accessibility Act is the private-sector counterpart. Your business is not covered by the public-sector regime, and its deadlines do not apply to you.
• Hospitality is not named explicitly. A hotel or restaurant is not on the list as a category. The likely route into scope is the e-commerce definition, which depends on whether the site completes a sale rather than merely describes the venue.

Scope decision table

Use this to place your own site. The middle column is deliberately cautious: if a boundary case matters commercially, confirm it rather than guess.

The two clocks: what is legally required now versus what is coming

The most common confusion is treating the newest standard as already binding. It is not.

The practical reading is straightforward. Build to WCAG 2.2 because it is the direction of travel and because it includes criteria that matter on hotel and restaurant sites, such as target size for touch, avoiding redundant data entry, and accessible authentication. Do not, however, tell a client or a regulator that v4.1.1 is already the law. Per AccessibleEU, it becomes the presumption-of-conformity route only once the Commission cites it.

WCAG 2.2 also removed one criterion, 4.1.1 Parsing, and added others. The additions most relevant to a booking or checkout flow are 2.5.8 Target Size (Minimum), 3.3.7 Redundant Entry and 3.3.8 Accessible Authentication. These are the areas where a small site usually fails a real user rather than a checker.

The microenterprise exemption, used carefully

The Act exempts microenterprises that provide services. In EU terms a microenterprise has fewer than ten employees and an annual turnover or balance sheet total not exceeding EUR 2 million. The Polish act restates this in Article 4: the provisions do not apply to services offered or provided by micro-entrepreneurs.

This is genuinely useful for many small Polish firms, but it is narrower than it sounds:

• It applies to services, not to businesses selling products, where a different and lighter regime applies.
• It is a size test, not a preference. Employee count and financial ceilings are both relevant.
• It does not stop a customer, a corporate buyer or a large platform from expecting accessibility, and it does not make an inaccessible checkout commercially wise.

If you are near the threshold, record how you applied the test. If you grow past it, the exemption stops applying.

A proportionate first project, ordered by the guest journey

Accessibility work fails when it starts with a site-wide list of thousands of automated findings. Start with the journey that produces revenue, then widen.

1. Confirm scope and write down the decision. Note the service type, whether online sale occurs, your size, and the date. This record is the first thing a reviewer will ask for.
2. Run an automated baseline on a small set of key pages. Use the free website audit to catch structural issues on the homepage, an offer or product page, the booking or cart page and the contact page. Automated tools find only part of the problem; treat them as triage.
3. Test the booking or checkout with a keyboard and at 200% zoom. Can you reach every field, see where focus is, read the labels, and complete the task without a mouse? This single test finds the defects that matter most.
4. Fix the recurring fundamentals. Check colour contrast with the contrast checker, build a consistent focus style, and give every form field a visible label and a useful error message. If a rebrand is coming, define a compliant palette first with the accessible palette generator.
5. Audit documents and alternatives. A PDF price list or menu that cannot be read by assistive technology is a gap on the page that links to it. For a fuller method, see the practical WCAG 2.2 audit.
6. Re-test and record the result. Keep the before-and-after evidence for the journey you fixed. Do not claim full conformance you have not tested.

The information duty and the disproportionate-burden test

Two duties are easy to miss. The Polish act requires a service provider to publish, in its terms of service or an equivalent document, how the service meets accessibility requirements. It also allows a provider to rely on disproportionate burden, but requires a documented assessment applying defined criteria, retained for five years.

Penalties sit with the President of PFRON or the competent market surveillance authority, and can reach ten times the average monthly wage, capped at 10% of turnover in the preceding financial year. Those are ceilings for serious cases, not a prediction for a small site that makes a genuine effort.

What this means in practice: keep a short accessibility record even if you are exempt, and update it when the site changes.

What not to do

• Do not buy an overlay widget and assume it creates compliance. An overlay changes the rendered page; it does not fix content, structure or a broken checkout flow.
• Do not promise full conformance in a proposal or a footer statement. Describe what you tested and when.
• Do not leave an old accessibility statement claiming WCAG 2.0 if the site now targets 2.2.
• Do not treat accessibility as a one-off project. A new template, a new booking engine or a new menu can reintroduce the same defects.

A realistic order of work

If your site sells online and you have done nothing, the sensible sequence is: confirm scope, baseline the revenue journey, fix contrast, focus, labels and errors, re-test, then extend coverage to the rest of the site. That is a small project with a defensible outcome, not a year-long programme.

If you are unsure whether your site is in scope, or you want the first project scoped around the booking or checkout journey rather than a generic checklist, describe the site, the market and the flow, and I will map the exposure and the smallest credible next step through my design and development services, or start with the contact form.

Sources

• Directive (EU) 2019/882 on the accessibility requirements for products and services, EUR-Lex
• European Commission: European Accessibility Act overview
• Polish Act of 26 April 2024, Dz.U. 2024 poz. 731 (full text)
• AccessibleEU: the European accessibility standard EN 301 549 has been updated
• European Commission: Web accessibility and the Web Accessibility Directive
• W3C: Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2
• W3C WAI: Understanding contrast minimum
• Google Search Central: Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content