The EAA and the ADA, One Year Into Enforcement: What's Actually Happening

When we first wrote about the European Accessibility Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act, the EAA was still a deadline on the horizon and most of the advice out there, ours included, was about getting ready. That world has gone. The EAA has now been enforceable for over a year, the first court rulings have landed, and on the other side of the Atlantic the ADA's web accessibility rules have shifted too.

So this is a full rewrite, based on what's actually happened rather than what was predicted. If you run a website that sells to EU customers, or you're an agency responsible for clients who do, the first year of enforcement contains some genuinely useful lessons, and one ruling in particular that should change how you think about "mostly compliant".

As always, a quick caveat: we are software developers; we're not lawyers, and this is general information rather than legal advice. For decisions about your specific situation, speak to someone qualified.

A quick recap of the two laws

The European Accessibility Act is an EU law that requires a wide range of products and services, including e-commerce, banking, transport booking and e-books, to be accessible to people with disabilities. It has applied to services placed on the EU market since 28 June 2025. Each EU country has written it into its own national law, with its own regulator and its own penalties, which is why the practical picture varies so much from country to country.

The Americans with Disabilities Act is the US equivalent in spirit, though it works very differently. Title II covers state and local government bodies; Title III covers private businesses open to the public. For years the ADA's application to websites was argued case by case in the courts. That changed in April 2024, when the US Department of Justice finalised a rule setting an explicit technical standard for government websites.

Underneath both laws sits the same technical foundation: the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, or WCAG, the internationally recognised checklist of what makes a website usable by people with disabilities.

The EAA's first year: enforcement is real, and it started with retail

The most important development of the year came from France. On 4 June 2026, a court in Caen ruled against Carrefour, one of Europe's largest retailers, over the accessibility of its e-commerce site and app. Two things about the ruling matter for everyone, not just French retailers.

First, Carrefour argued that its site scored just over 71 per cent against the French accessibility standard. The court rejected that argument outright: partial compliance is not compliance, and each applicable criterion has to be met. Second, the court attached teeth: a daily fine for continued non-compliance and damages awarded to the disability associations that brought the case. If your internal position on accessibility is "we score reasonably well", this first major EAA court ruling suggests that's not a defensible regulatory position, though your specific circumstances may differ.

France has been the most aggressive country overall. Disability organisations sent formal legal notices to major retailers within weeks of the June 2025 deadline and escalated to court action when responses fell short. But the rest of the map is filling in too. Germany's market surveillance authority, established under the BFSG (German implementation of the EAA), became operational in the second half of 2025 and is now following up with companies on non-compliance. German businesses have also received warning letters from law firms invoking competition law a separate enforcement route that runs parallel to regulatory action. Sweden's regulator has been active since the June 2025 deadline, logging complaints and running targeted e-commerce reviews. The Netherlands moved from voluntary self-reporting to active audits, and Italy introduced a two-stage process of cooperation first, sanctions second.

Two patterns stand out from all of this. Enforcement is largely complaint-driven, so any user of your site can trigger an inquiry, and regulators are prioritising companies that show no evidence of taking their obligations seriously. As of July 2026, no major headline-grabbing fines had been issued under the EAA, though the frameworks are in place, ranging from tens of thousands of euros in France and Germany to seven-figure ceilings in Spain and Italy. The Carrefour ruling suggests courts are willing to use enforcement mechanisms when partial compliance is presented as sufficient.

Who the EAA actually catches

A few points from the first year that are worth being clear on, because they're widely misunderstood.

It applies to you if you sell into the EU, wherever you're based. A UK or US business with EU customers is in scope, Brexit notwithstanding. For our UK readers, this is the detail that matters most: the Equality Act 2010 already required accessible services at home, but the EAA adds EU regulators and courts to the picture for anything you sell across the Channel.

The microenterprise exemption is narrower than people think. Service providers with fewer than ten employees and under €2 million turnover are exempt, but this applies to services only, and the moment you grow past either threshold the obligation arrives.

"Disproportionate burden" is not an easy get-out-of-jail card. The EAA allows you to claim that full compliance would impose a disproportionate burden on your organisation, but the claim requires documented assessments (using the methodology in Annex VI of the directive) and notification to authorities in each relevant country. Organisations that claimed exemptions without formal documentation triggered follow-up inquiries. If you believe compliance is disproportionate, consult with a qualified advisor in your jurisdiction about properly documenting the claim.

There's no one-stop shop. Unlike GDPR, where one lead regulator can handle a company's EU-wide compliance, the EAA runs country by country. Accessibility statements, exemption notifications and enforcement all happen per member state, which multiplies the admin for anyone selling across several markets.

The ADA in 2026: a delay, not a reprieve

The US picture changed twice in quick succession. In April 2024, the Department of Justice finalised its rule requiring state and local government websites and apps to meet WCAG 2.1 level AA, the first time a specific technical standard was written into ADA regulation. Then on 20 April 2026, the DOJ extended the compliance deadlines by one year: bodies serving populations of 50,000 or more now have until 26 April 2027, and smaller entities and special districts until 26 April 2028.

It's tempting to read the extension as the pressure coming off. We'd read it differently, for two reasons. The DOJ was explicit that it fully intends to implement the rule at the new deadlines, and the underlying non-discrimination obligations of the ADA never paused, so private lawsuits can and do continue through the extension period. The standard itself, WCAG 2.1 AA, hasn't changed either. Organisations that use the extra year to start later, rather than to finish properly, may face compliance risk, though individual circumstances vary.

For private businesses under Title III, there's still no written technical standard, and there probably won't be one soon. Instead, there is a steady stream of litigation: thousands of website accessibility lawsuits are filed in the US every year, overwhelmingly against businesses. In 2025 alone, over 3,900 ADA web accessibility cases were filed in federal court [federal records]. Courts and settlements have consistently pointed to WCAG as the technical benchmark, even without a formal regulatory standard. The absence of a formal rule has never been much protection in practice.

The standards underneath, and the version question

One genuinely confusing area deserves untangling, because the laws and the standards have drifted slightly out of step.

WCAG 2.2 has been the current version of the guidelines since late 2023. But the EU's harmonised technical standard, EN 301 549, still references WCAG 2.1, and the ADA's Title II rule specifies WCAG 2.1 AA as well. An update to the European standard to align with WCAG 2.2, version 4.1.1, is expected during 2026 (with October 2026 mentioned as a potential harmonisation date).

Our general guidance hasn't changed and is mercifully simple: build and test to WCAG 2.2 level AA. It includes everything in 2.1, so you satisfy both regimes as they stand today, and you're already where the European standard is expected to move. Chasing the legal minimum version by version is more work than meeting the current guidelines, though your specific compliance pathway should be discussed with a qualified advisor.

What the first year says you should actually do

Strip out the regulatory detail and the lessons from year one are refreshingly practical.

Know your whole site's position, not your homepage's. The Carrefour ruling turned on criterion-by-criterion compliance across a real service, not an overall impression. Most accessibility problems live on internal pages: product pages, checkout flows, account areas, PDFs. If you've only ever tested your homepage, you don't yet know where you stand. This is exactly why we built SiteBeacon to analyse every page rather than a sample of one.

Monitor continuously, because compliance decays. Every deploy, CMS update and new campaign page can introduce regressions. The companies that came through year one well treated accessibility as an ongoing property of the site, not a one-off audit with a certificate at the end.

Get the paperwork right. An accessibility statement, a working feedback channel for users to report barriers, and documented assessments behind any exemption you claim. Regulators in several countries used exactly these artefacts to decide who to look at more closely.

Respond when someone reports a barrier. Complaint-driven enforcement means your own users are the front line. A reported barrier that gets fixed is a support ticket; one that gets ignored is how inquiries start. The French cases began precisely this way.

Don't wait for your deadline. Whether it's the extended US dates or an EAA regulator working through its complaint backlog, the pattern from year one is that the organisations in most difficulty are the ones that treated the deadline as the start date. Proactive compliance is materially different from reactive compliance.

Our take

A year in, the EAA has done what it was designed to do: move digital accessibility from a good intention to an enforceable baseline, with real courts issuing real orders. The ADA is moving the same direction on a bumpier road. But the more interesting shift is commercial. Accessible websites work better for everyone; they tend to be faster and easier to use, and they're increasingly what enterprise procurement asks about before signing. The risk mitigation is important; the better website is the actual strategic prize.

If you'd like to know where your site, or your clients' sites, actually stand against these standards, SiteBeacon checks accessibility across every page alongside performance and carbon, and monitors all three continuously. Start a free trial or talk to us about auditing at scale.