Yes — the European Accessibility Act (EAA) applies to US companies that sell products or services to consumers in the European Union, regardless of where the business is headquartered. The law has been enforceable since June 28, 2025, and it explicitly covers e-commerce, so an American company taking orders from EU customers is in scope. What matters is where your customers are, not where your company is incorporated.
The rest of this guide covers what the law requires, who is exempt, and how the EAA fits alongside the US rules you may already be tracking.
What is the European Accessibility Act?
The EAA is an EU-wide law that sets common accessibility requirements for products and services sold to EU consumers. Instead of navigating a different national standard in every member state, businesses now face one harmonized baseline across the entire EU market.
Its scope is broad — banking services, e-books, transport and ticketing services, self-service terminals — but the category that pulls in the most US businesses is e-commerce. If your website sells to EU consumers, the website itself is a covered service.
Enforcement began on June 28, 2025. Each member state enforces the law through its own national legislation, so the specific penalties and enforcement bodies vary by country, but the underlying requirements are the same across the EU.
Does the European Accessibility Act apply to US companies?
It applies to any company selling covered products or services into the EU market, and US companies are no exception. Like the GDPR before it, the EAA follows the customer, not the corporate address. A Delaware corporation with a checkout flow that accepts orders from Paris or Berlin faces the same accessibility requirements as a French or German retailer.
What counts as selling into the EU?
The clearest signals: you ship physical goods to EU addresses, sell digital products or subscriptions to EU consumers, price in euros, or run marketing aimed at EU countries. A US-only business whose website merely happens to be reachable from Europe is in a different position from one actively taking EU orders.
The practical test: if EU consumer revenue shows up in your books, assume you are in scope.
What does the EAA require for websites?
The technical standard behind the EAA is EN 301 549, which for web content incorporates WCAG 2.1 at Level AA — the same family of guidelines US courts and the Department of Justice reference. If you already know what WCAG Level AA means in the American context, you know the substance of what the EAA expects: sufficient color contrast, keyboard operability, labeled forms, alt text, captions, and the rest.
One wrinkle: WCAG 2.2 became the current W3C Recommendation on October 5, 2023, adding nine success criteria on top of 2.1. Because 2.2 AA includes everything in 2.1 AA, remediating against WCAG 2.2 AA addresses the technical basis of the EAA and future-proofs the work at the same time. The differences are broken down in our comparison of WCAG 2.1 vs 2.2 vs 3.0.
Documentation matters too. EU customers and procurement teams increasingly ask for an Accessibility Conformance Report, and the VPAT template has a dedicated EN 301 549 edition — our guide to VPATs and ACRs explains how those documents work and when you need one.
Who is exempt from the EAA?
The EAA includes a microenterprise exemption for service providers: businesses with fewer than 10 staff and annual turnover of no more than €2 million are excused from the service requirements. Both conditions must hold — a twelve-person company misses the exemption, and so does a three-person company clearing more than €2 million.
Two cautions before you lean on it. First, the exemption does nothing about US exposure, where the ADA carries no size threshold at all. Second, an inaccessible checkout loses customers whether or not a regulator ever notices — over 1 in 4 US adults live with a disability, and disabled customers in the EU shop online like everyone else.
How does the EAA compare to US accessibility law?
On paper, the EAA is the stricter framework. ADA Title III has no formal federal regulation naming a web standard for private businesses; the DOJ's longstanding position and most courts treat business websites as covered, and WCAG is the de facto benchmark that settlements reference. The EAA, by contrast, is an explicit statute pointing to a named technical standard.
The US is drifting in the same direction. The DOJ's Title II rule, published April 24, 2024, adopted WCAG 2.1 AA for state and local government websites — and in April 2026 the DOJ extended those compliance deadlines to April 26, 2027 for entities serving 50,000 or more people and April 26, 2028 for smaller ones. EU regulators, the DOJ, and US courts are all converging on the same target: WCAG at Level AA.
That convergence is good operational news. There is no separate "EAA project" and "ADA project" — a codebase brought to genuine WCAG 2.2 AA conformance through remediation and human testing addresses the technical substance of both at once.
What should US companies do now?
- Size your EU exposure. Pull the numbers: EU orders, EU subscriptions, euro-denominated revenue. If they are material, the EAA is your problem too.
- Audit against WCAG 2.2 AA. Automated scanning is a useful start, but it can detect only roughly a third of WCAG success criteria — the rest require human testing with keyboards and screen readers. A free accessibility audit shows where your site stands before you commit budget.
- Remediate at the code level. Fix the markup, the components, and the checkout flow itself. Prioritize the failures that block transactions — the money pages are also the pages regulators and plaintiffs look at first.
- Document your conformance. Publish an accessibility statement and, if EU partners or procurement teams ask, prepare an ACR on the EN 301 549 edition of the VPAT.
One warning: do not reach for an overlay. Third-party overlay scripts sold as making a broken site compliant do not deliver — WebAIM's million-homepage analysis found sites using overlays averaged roughly as many detectable errors as sites without them, and the FTC fined overlay vendor accessiBe $1 million in a January 2025 action over unsubstantiated compliance claims. That is a different thing from a user-facing preference widget — contrast and text-size controls on a site that is already accessible at the code level, making no compliance claims. The problem is the compliance claim, not the preference button. The full breakdown is in our post on why overlay widgets fail.
Frequently asked questions
What is EN 301 549 and how does it relate to WCAG?
EN 301 549 is the European technical standard for accessible information and communications technology, and it is the standard the EAA relies on. For websites and mobile apps, it incorporates WCAG 2.1 Level AA, so the day-to-day work — contrast, keyboard access, form labels, alt text, captions — is the same WCAG work US teams already know. The standard also covers territory WCAG does not, such as hardware and support documentation, which matters mainly to product manufacturers rather than typical online sellers.
Is there a small-business exemption from the European Accessibility Act?
For services, yes, but it is narrow: microenterprises with fewer than 10 staff and no more than €2 million in annual turnover are exempt from the EAA's service requirements. Miss either threshold and the exemption is gone.
It also has no bearing on US law. The ADA applies to businesses of every size, which is why small companies with modest revenue still receive demand letters over their websites.
Can EU regulators actually enforce the EAA against a US company?
Each member state enforces the EAA through its own national authorities, and the mechanics of pursuing a foreign company vary by country. The practical pressure points, however, are real: consumer and competitor complaints, obligations flowing through EU-based marketplaces and partners, and procurement processes that demand documented conformance before signing.
The safer assumption — as with GDPR — is that the market you sell into sets the rules you follow.
Selling into Europe now means web accessibility is a two-continent requirement — and the fix is identical on both sides of the Atlantic. Request a free WCAG 2.2 accessibility audit from ADA Fail and get a code-level punch list: no widgets, no vague scores, just what to fix and how to fix it.