Web accessibility is no longer a topic reserved for large public administrations or digital inclusion advocates. Since June 2025, a European directive has imposed concrete obligations on a growing number of private businesses. If you have a website and run a commercial operation in Europe, you are likely affected by these requirements.
An accessible website is one that can be used by everyone, including people with visual, auditory, motor or cognitive impairments. More concretely, a visually impaired user navigating with a screen reader must be able to understand the content, a colour-blind person must be able to read text with adequate contrast, and a visitor who cannot use a mouse must be able to navigate using an alternative input device.
What are we talking about?
Accessibility is simply a matter of design. Well designed, a site is naturally accessible. Poorly designed, it excludes a portion of its visitors without even realising it. In Europe, around 135 million people live with a disability. Ignoring their needs means ignoring a significant share of potential customers.
The European Accessibility Directive: what has changed
The European Accessibility Act (EAA), transposed into Belgian law and across all member states, came into force in June 2025 and now impacts the private sector. The accessibility obligation, previously limited to the public sector, has been extended to private businesses depending on their activity.
Those concerned include e-commerce sites, online banking services, transport services, streaming platforms, commercial mobile applications, and more broadly any digital service offered to the public within the European Union. As with the GDPR, significant penalties and fines are provided for in cases of non-compliance, although they are not yet being enforced consistently.
SMEs with fewer than ten employees and less than two million euros in turnover may sometimes benefit from exemptions, but these exemptions do not apply to all obligations and vary from country to country.
The WCAG: the technical foundation
Content must be perceivable, operable, understandable and robust.
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are the international standard that defines accessibility in concrete terms. Published and maintained by the W3C, they are built around four principles: content must be perceivable, operable, understandable and robust.
WCAG 2.1 level AA is the reference standard required by the European directive. It covers in particular:
- Contrast between text and its background: a minimum value is required to ensure readability.
- Alternative text for images: every image that conveys information must be described in text for screen readers.
- Keyboard navigation: all features of the site (links, menus, etc.) must be accessible without a mouse.
- Subtitles on videos: all audio or video content must be subtitled.
- The semantic structure of the code: headings, lists and forms must be correctly marked up so that assistive technologies can interpret them.
What this means in practice
If your site was built recently following good practices, you are probably already partially compliant. Clean semantic HTML, sufficient contrast, and alternative text on images are practices that any good developer typically applies without thinking twice.
That said, most existing sites have gaps, often unintentional ones. Text too small, buttons without explicit labels, poorly structured forms, videos without subtitles. These common issues are straightforward to fix once identified.
An accessibility audit allows you to take stock of the current situation and define which corrections to apply based on impact and complexity. Automated tools such as WAVE or Axe provide a quick initial overview, but a manual review remains essential. A human (inclusive) testing session may also be necessary.
By working on your site’s accessibility, you are also working on its SEO.
Accessibility and SEO: one good practice affects both
This is probably the least well-known aspect, but the most interesting one: accessibility best practices and SEO best practices overlap on several points. Semantic code helps screen readers, but also search engine crawlers for optimal indexing. Alternative texts inform visually impaired users and allow Google Images to index your visuals. A consistent heading structure makes navigation easier for a user with a disability and enables structured indexing of your content by search engines.
By working on your site’s accessibility, you are also working on its SEO.
Where to start?
If you are not sure where your site stands, start with a quick test. The WAVE tool, available for free online, analyses any URL and flags the most obvious accessibility issues. Google Lighthouse, built into the Chrome console, also provides an accessibility score with concrete recommendations.
If the results reveal problems, you should consider a structured audit, a prioritised correction plan, and as a last resort a full redesign. In the majority of cases, the corrections with the highest return on investment are also the simplest to implement.
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In summary
Web accessibility has moved from being an optional practice left to individual discretion to a legal obligation for many web operators in Europe. But this regulatory compliance requirement should be seen as an opportunity to have a better designed, more readable, faster, better indexed site that is open to a wider audience, not as yet another imposed investment with no return.