The European Accessibility Act: who are you really doing it for?

Who is this law actually for?

An estimated 1.3 billion people worldwide live with a significant disability, 16% of the world's population (WHO, 2022). In the EU, more than 1 in 4 adults report a moderate or severe disability; the European Commission works with a figure of around 87 million people. The numbers differ because of definitions and survey years, which is why we cite both, with sources.

Disability is a spectrum, and it includes your customer

Disability is rarely 'on or off'. The well-known framework from Microsoft's Inclusive Design toolkit shows that the same design choice helps three groups at once:

The best-sourced numbers per type: at least 2.2 billion people worldwide have a vision impairment and over 1.5 billion some form of hearing loss (WHO, estimates). In the EU, 20.3% of people aged 16+ report difficulty seeing and 18.5% difficulty walking (Eurostat, 2022). For cognitive disabilities no reliable total exists from a primary source, so we don't invent one.

How people with disabilities use your website

Accessibility is concrete: it determines whether these tools and strategies work on your site or break down (classification: W3C WAI).

How often does this go wrong? In WebAIM's annual analysis of the 1 million most popular homepages, 95.9% had automatically detectable WCAG failures, 56 per page on average (2026). And those are only the errors a machine can see.

Note: precisely these tools, voice control, switch access, can conflict with a JavaScript overlay placed over your site. The Overlay Fact Sheet points out that such a layer often doesn't remove the real barrier and can interfere with assistive tools.

How the convention became law

The European Accessibility Act is not a random idea, it implements a human rights convention that virtually the whole world is party to. The line can be read directly in the law itself.

1. 2006

   The UN adopts the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). Article 9 requires access to information and communications technology, on an equal basis.

2. 2008

   The convention enters into force. By now over 190 countries and the EU itself are parties, virtually the whole world.

3. 2011

   The EU itself becomes a party to the convention, the first human rights treaty binding the Union as a whole. From now on, accessibility is a legal obligation of the EU, not just policy.

4. 2016

   Web Accessibility Directive (2016/2102): public sector websites and apps must be accessible, technically defined by standard EN 301 549.

5. 2019

   European Accessibility Act (2019/882): the same logic for the market, e-commerce, banking, e-books, transport interfaces, payment terminals and more.

6. 2025

   Now active: enforcement

   Since 28 June 2025 the EAA applies: accessibility is a market-access requirement in all 27 member states.

7. 2030

   End of the transition period: by 28 June 2030 services that already existed before 2025 must comply as well.

“This Directive defines persons with disabilities in line with the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, adopted on 13 December 2006 (UN CRPD), to which the Union has been a Party since 21 January 2011 and which all Member States have ratified.”

For anyone selling EU-wide, the EAA is above all harmonisation: without it, every member state would implement its treaty obligation with its own diverging rules, 27 rulebooks instead of one.

What this means for you as a business owner

What the numbers actually say

This industry circulates big numbers without a traceable primary source, about visitors clicking away, billions in missed revenue and higher Google rankings. We deliberately don't use them. Every figure on this page comes from a primary source, estimates are marked as estimates, and the full source list is below.