A deadline has arrived that a lot of Irish businesses have not heard about, and the ones who have heard tend to have been told either that it is nothing or that it is a catastrophe.
Neither is right. The European Accessibility Act is real, it reaches further than most people assume, and for a well-built site the work involved is smaller than the anxiety suggests.
What it is
European legislation requiring a range of products and services to be accessible to people with disabilities. It has been coming for years and the compliance date for the businesses it covers has now landed.
The important shift is one of framing. Accessibility used to be presented as good practice, something a considerate business did when there was budget. For the services in scope, it is now a legal requirement with enforcement behind it.
Whether it applies to you
Two questions, roughly.
Do you sell to consumers online, or provide a covered service? The Act is aimed at consumer-facing services: e-commerce, banking, transport, e-books, electronic communications. A site that takes orders or bookings from the public is squarely the kind of thing it was written for. A brochure site that only describes what you do is a different case.
How small are you? There is an exemption for microenterprises providing services, generally understood as fewer than ten people and turnover under a threshold. This is the point most small Irish businesses land on, and it is also the point worth checking properly rather than assuming, because the detail matters and it is not the same for products as for services.
Treat the above as orientation rather than a determination. If you are near the line, get the position confirmed by someone qualified rather than by an article.
Why to do it even if exempt
This is the part worth sitting with, because the exemption invites you to stop reading and that would be a mistake.
A significant share of the population has a disability affecting how they use a website. Add older customers, anyone with a temporary injury, and everyone using a phone one-handed in bright sunlight, and the group who benefit from an accessible site is far larger than the group the law was written for.
Every one of them is a customer who either completes a purchase or gives up. There is no notification when someone gives up. It looks exactly like nothing happening, which is why this category of loss goes unnoticed for years.
The overlap with ordinary quality is also nearly total. Clear labels, readable contrast, sensible headings and a form that explains its own errors are simply signs of a well-made site. Almost nothing on the accessibility list is a concession.
What actually needs doing
The standard behind all of this is WCAG. It is long. In practice, a small number of failures account for the overwhelming majority of real problems.
- Contrast. Light grey text on white is the single most common failure on small business sites, and it comes from designers optimising for a look on a good screen in a dark room.
- Images without alt text. Every meaningful image needs a description. Decorative ones should be explicitly marked as decorative rather than left ambiguous.
- Keyboard access. Everything reachable and usable without a mouse, with a visible indicator showing where you are. Custom menus and modal windows are where this usually breaks.
- Form labels. Every field needs a real label, not placeholder text that vanishes the moment someone types.
- Heading structure. Headings used in order to describe the page, not chosen because one looked the right size.
- Video captions. Required if you publish video, and useful to the large number of people who watch with the sound off anyway.
On a reasonably built site, that list is days rather than weeks.
On accessibility overlays
You will be offered a script that promises to make your site compliant for a monthly fee. A widget appears in the corner and the problem is declared solved.
Be extremely cautious. These products are widely criticised by the disability community and by accessibility practitioners, they do not fix underlying markup problems, and they have been the subject of legal action rather than a defence against it. A tool that sits on top of an inaccessible site does not make it accessible; it makes it an inaccessible site with a widget.
Fix the site. It costs less over three years and it actually works.
Where to start
Run a free automated checker over your busiest pages. Automated tools catch perhaps a third of real issues, but that third is the mechanical third, and it is the cheapest to resolve.
Then do the two manual checks no tool can do for you. Put the mouse aside and try to complete your own contact or checkout process using only the keyboard. Then look at your site on a phone, outdoors, and see whether you can actually read the grey text.
Those two tests find more real problems than most paid audits, and they take fifteen minutes.
The honest summary
If you sell to consumers online and are not a microenterprise, this is an obligation and worth getting confirmed properly.
If you are exempt, it is still worth doing, because the work is mostly the same work as building a decent site and the customers it recovers were never showing up in any report.
If you are about to commission a new site, this is the moment it is nearly free. Retrofitting later is the expensive path, which is worth factoring into what you budget in the first place. If you are unsure whether your current site would pass, describe what you have and you will get a straight answer.
Common questions
Does this apply to my small business?
It targets consumer-facing services like e-commerce and banking, and there is a microenterprise exemption for services. If you are near the line, get the position confirmed properly rather than assuming from an article.
Do accessibility overlay widgets make us compliant?
No, and they are widely criticised by the disability community and by practitioners. They do not fix underlying markup, and they have been the subject of legal action rather than a defence against it.
What are the quickest wins?
Text contrast, alt text on meaningful images, real form labels, and being able to complete your own contact form using only the keyboard. Those four find more real problems than most paid audits.