This Saturday, June 28, 2025, the European Accessibility Act (EAA) becomes enforceable. If your business sells products or services to consumers in the EU — even from the other side of an ocean — your website is now expected to meet accessibility standards, with real penalties for ignoring them.

Most small businesses reading about the EAA will conclude “we’re not in Europe, doesn’t apply to us” and close the tab. That’s a mistake, for two reasons.

Accessibility regulation is spreading, not shrinking. The EAA follows years of ADA-based website lawsuits in the United States, where thousands of cases are filed annually against businesses whose sites can’t be used with a screen reader or keyboard. The trend line is one direction: an inaccessible website is an increasing legal liability wherever you operate.

The business reason

Roughly one in six people lives with some form of disability, and far more experience situational limits — bright sunlight, a broken trackpad, aging eyes, a noisy room. Every accessibility improvement you make serves all of them:

  • Sufficient color contrast helps everyone reading a phone outdoors.
  • Keyboard navigation helps power users and people with motor impairments alike.
  • Descriptive link text and headings help screen readers and search engines — Google’s crawler is, functionally, a blind user.
  • Properly labeled forms reduce errors and abandoned submissions for everybody.

That last point deserves emphasis: accessibility and SEO overlap heavily. Semantic headings, alt text, fast pages, and clear structure are ranking signals. Making your site accessible is one of the few investments that reduces legal risk, expands your market, and improves search visibility in a single stroke.

What “accessible” actually means

The practical benchmark is WCAG 2.1 AA (soon 2.2). In plain English, an accessible site means:

  1. Text has enough contrast against its background to read comfortably.
  2. Everything reachable by mouse is reachable by keyboard.
  3. Images that carry meaning have text alternatives.
  4. Forms have visible labels and clear error messages.
  5. The page makes sense when read aloud in order, heading by heading.
  6. Nothing flashes, traps focus, or moves in ways users can’t stop.

None of this is exotic. It’s simply competent construction — which is exactly why retrofitting a badly built site is expensive, while building it right the first time costs almost nothing extra.

How to check where you stand

Free tools like Lighthouse (built into Chrome) and WAVE will catch the mechanical failures: missing labels, low contrast, absent alt text. They won’t catch everything — automated tools find maybe a third of real issues — but if your site fails the automated pass, it certainly fails the human one.

At Digital Orange, accessibility isn’t a line item we upsell; it’s how we build websites by default. Semantic HTML, tested keyboard flows, honest contrast ratios, reduced-motion support. The EAA deadline is a good prompt to ask your own developer an uncomfortable question: was our site built this way?

If the answer is a shrug, we should talk.