Accessibility isn't optional; Preparing for the new EU Accessibility Act
On June 28th 2025 the European Accessibility Act (EAA) will come into effect. While this is a milestone improvement in the digital space, there can understandably be some questions about how this will affect you and your business. From understanding what the new law requires to how you need to adapt your website, it can probably feel a little overwhelming. Piquant can answer some of your questions and offer support!
Overview of the New EU Accessibility Legislation
What Is the European Accessibility Act?
The European Accessibility Act (EAA) is a new EU law designed to make life easier for everyone. It sets standards across Europe to help ensure that people with disabilities can access everyday products and services. The aim is to remove the barriers people with disabilities face on a daily basis.
Who has to comply?
The purpose of the legislation is to make sure that digital products and services are accessible to all people. These include:
- Websites and mobile application
- E-commerce platforms
- Banking services
- E-books and e-readers
- Audio-visual media services
- Computers and operating systems
- ATMs and self-service kiosks
This means that any business in the public or private sector that provides a service or product digitally within the EU needs to be accessibility compliant. So even if your business is based in the UK, if your services are accessed in Ireland or any other EU country, you must be accessibility compliant.
What happens to businesses that don’t comply?
It’s understood that the penalties being imposed on businesses that aren’t compliant will be quite severe. Some of these penalties will include monetary fines, reputational damage and legal issues. Once the legislation comes into effect in June 2025, we’ll start to get a clearer understanding of how this will impact non-compliant businesses.
Understanding how accessibility can be measured
Broken down into its most basic fundamentals, accessibility can be categorised into key areas: design, technical, and content. Breaking it down in this way helps to understand where the focus for change needs to be for you and your business needs.
Design
Accessible design revolves around what the user sees and how information is presented to them. Have a read of our Accessibility meets design article for a deep dive into colour contrast and visual accessibility. But there’s still considerations outside of that which need attention. Some questions you can ask are:
- Am I using images that have text information in them?
- Is there enough contrast between the background and my text content colours?
- Are my links distinguishable from the body text that doesn’t rely on colour?
Technical
Technical accessibility is all of the stuff that goes on in the background without being noticed - until you need it! There are many technical considerations to assess digital accessibility. Such as:
- Can my website or PDF ‘talk’ to a range of assistive technologies?
- Are my buttons labelled correctly?
- Can my image alt tags be identified correctly?
Content
The text content that is added to a digital page or document should also be an accessibility consideration. Some of the questions to ask are:
- Are all email addresses and phone numbers clickable?
- Does the link text on my page make sense?
- Are my text headings in the correct order?
- Am I using language that is understandable and not too complex?
These are just a tiny sample of the kinds of questions that you need to be asking when considering if your website is accessible. If your answer was ‘no’, or even ‘I don’t understand what this means’ then it’s quite possible that you need help to ensure you are meeting the new digital accessibility requirements. And that’s where we come in!
How Piquant can help
Over the past few years, Piquant has made a big push to make sure the work that we produce follows the best accessibility practices. We have shifted our mindset from accessibility being an afterthought to it being at the forefront of our digital offering. We’ve collaborated with several clients using a range of digital tools and manual testing to ensure that we’re creating digital environments that are inclusive to everyone. Some of the services we can provide are:
- Provide an accessibility audit on your communication tools - websites, PDF’s etc
- Provide 3rd party evaluation recommendations
- Assist with updating your website to comply with technical accessibility requirements
- Adapt your brand colours for accessibility
- Provide recommendations to keep on-page content accessible
- Provide an accessible content creation strategy and checklist
We know that every business is different and that meeting accessibility legislation can be a journey, depending on the scale and complexity of your digital footprint. We can support you in building out an accessibility plan that is achievable and manageable for your business.
Conclusion
While achieving accessibility compliance may seem like a huge undertaking at first, Piquant can help you along each step of the journey, breaking it down to fit your business needs. We are committed to creating and improving inclusive digital spaces, so that everyone can access and understand your business. From June 28 accessibility is no longer a nice to have, it is necessary for your business to operate in the digital space.
