European Accessibility Act

Does the European Accessibility Act apply to your website?

Two questions settle it: are you selling to consumers, and do you employ fewer than ten people. Most Irish SMEs can answer both in a minute.

By Oscar CobbeCurrent as at 31 August 202610 minute read7 sources

The Act, and the date it already passed

The instrument is the European Union (Accessibility Requirements of Products and Services) Regulations 2023, S.I. No. 636 of 2023, which transposes Directive (EU) 2019/882. Regulation 1(2) brought it into operation on 28 June 2025.

That is worth saying before anything else. This is not a regulation that is coming. It has been in force for over a year, and the reason most Irish businesses have not heard of it is that it arrived with no enforcement campaign behind it.

The first question: do you sell to consumers

Regulation 3(2) opens with words that decide most cases: the Regulations apply to the following services provided to consumers on or after 28 June 2025.

Consumer is defined in Regulation 2(1) as any natural person who, for purposes outside their trade, business, craft or profession, purchases a product or receives a service. And an e-commerce service is defined as a service provided at a distance through websites and mobile device-based services, by electronic means and at the individual request of a consumer, with a view to concluding a consumer contract.

So a website that sells only to other businesses is outside the e-commerce limb. That is a real answer and it is not a technicality.

The caveat matters as much as the rule. The test is about the transaction, not about how the company describes itself. A site that takes business orders and also sells to individuals is caught to the extent it serves consumers. Saying we are business to business is a conclusion about who buys, and it is worth checking against what the checkout actually accepts.

Service	In scope	Regulation
Selling goods or services online to consumers	Yes	3(2)(g)
Consumer banking services	Yes	3(2)(e)
E-books and their dedicated software	Yes	3(2)(f)
Electronic communications services	Yes	3(2)(a)
Access to audiovisual media services	Yes	3(2)(b)
Air, bus, rail and waterborne transport websites, apps, e-tickets	Yes	3(2)(c)
Urban, suburban and regional transport	Self-service terminals only	3(2)(d)
Answering emergency communications to 112	Yes	3(3)
A brochure site that sells nothing	No	outside 3(2)
A site selling only to businesses	No	outside 3(2)

The second question: how many people do you employ

Regulation 5(4) is the sentence a small Irish business needs. It disapplies Regulation 5(3) and Regulation 14 in respect of a service provided by a microenterprise.

Microenterprise is defined in Regulation 2(1) as an enterprise employing fewer than 10 persons and having an annual turnover not exceeding 2 million euro or an annual balance sheet total not exceeding 2 million euro.

The structure of that test catches people. The headcount limb is a hard gate joined by and. The financial limb is an either or: you need to satisfy only one of turnover or balance sheet. So a nine-person company with 3 million in turnover and a 1.5 million balance sheet total is still a microenterprise.

The Competition and Consumer Protection Commission puts the consequence about as plainly as it can be put in its own guidance for microenterprises: the requirements and obligations of the European Accessibility Act do not apply to microenterprises providing services.

This exemption is for services only

There is no headcount relief on the product side. A five-person company that imports or distributes an in-scope product carries importer or distributor duties in full, and the closed product list is shorter than people expect. That is the subject of the piece on where the exemption stops, and it is the single most common misreading of this Act in Ireland.

What is carved out even when you are in scope

Regulation 3(4) removes five categories of content from the requirements, and two of them are worth knowing before anybody quotes for a remediation project.

Pre-recorded time-based media published before 28 June 2025 is out. So are office file formats published before that date. Online maps are out where the service is navigational and the essential information is provided in an accessible digital manner. Third-party content that you neither fund, develop nor control is out. And archived content is out where it is not updated or edited on or after 28 June 2025.

The archived content carve-out has a trap in it. It survives only while the content is genuinely left alone. Editing an old page brings it back inside.

The two ways out, and the paperwork attached

Regulation 15(1) provides the two exits. Paragraph (a) is fundamental alteration: the requirement would require a significant change in the basic nature of the product or service. Paragraph (b) is disproportionate burden, assessed against the criteria in Schedule 4.

Neither is a position you can simply hold. Both require an assessment, and Regulation 15 obliges you to be able to produce the relevant facts to the authority on request. A microenterprise dealing in products is relieved of some of the documentation duty under Regulation 15(5), but Regulation 15(6) still requires it to supply the facts if the CCPC asks.

One provision closes the obvious loophole, and it is the one to read before applying for anything. Regulation 15(8) prevents an operator relying on disproportionate burden where it has received external funding, public or private, for the purpose of improving accessibility. Taking a grant to fix your site and then arguing it was too expensive is not available.

Who enforces this, which is not one body

Regulation 4 designates seven authorities and splits them by service rather than by size of business.

For most Irish website owners the answer is the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission, which is the market surveillance authority for all in-scope products under Regulation 4(1) and the compliance authority for e-books and dedicated software and for e-commerce services under Regulation 4(2)(f) and (g).

The others follow the sector. ComReg covers electronic communications services and 112. Coimisiún na Meán covers access to audiovisual media services. The Irish Aviation Authority covers air passenger transport, and the National Transport Authority covers bus, rail and waterborne transport. Consumer banking sits with the Central Bank of Ireland.

The National Disability Authority is not an enforcement body under this Act. Regulation 4(4) gives it an advisory role: it advises the relevant authority on matters related to the accessibility requirements. The NDA does have a statutory monitoring role, but that is under the separate public sector regime, and confusing the two is how a private business ends up doing public sector paperwork.

What actually happens if you are not compliant

The escalation is procedural before it is punitive. Regulation 27 requires a notice of proposal before a direction is issued, with 14 days to make written representations. A direction can be appealed to the District Court within 14 days under Regulation 28, and an authority can seek a compliance order in the Circuit Court under Regulation 29. Failing to comply is where the offence arises.

The penalties, from Regulation 32(6), are a class A fine or up to six months on summary conviction, and a fine not exceeding 60,000 euro or up to eighteen months on conviction on indictment, or both. Regulation 33 extends liability to a director, manager, secretary or other officer where the offence was committed with their consent or connivance or is attributable to their wilful neglect.

If you have read that Irish penalties under this Act reach 100,000 euro or a percentage of turnover, that figure is not in the statutory instrument. It circulates widely and it is wrong.

The exposure most write-ups miss is not the fine at all. Regulation 30 lets a consumer apply directly to the Circuit Court for a compliance order without waiting for any regulator to act, and Regulation 30(10) allows a representative body to engage on the consumer's behalf with their approval.

Has anybody been prosecuted

We have found no published Irish enforcement action, direction or prosecution under S.I. No. 636 of 2023 as at 31 August 2026. The CCPC's accessibility pages carry guidance and a microenterprise guideline rather than outcomes, and ComReg's information notice of June 2025 says it can take enforcement action without reporting any.

That is a statement about what is published. Regulation 27's notice and representations procedure happens in private, and no authority is obliged to announce a direction. None published is not the same as none issued.

What to do about it

In the order that answers the cheapest question first.

1Work out whether consumers can buy from you. If they cannot, the e-commerce limb does not reach you and most of this Act is not yours.
2Count the people. Fewer than ten, plus either turnover or balance sheet total at or under 2 million, and the service side is exempt under Regulation 5(4).
3If you deal in any physical product at all, check the closed product list separately. The exemption above does not travel to the shelf.
4If you are in scope, fix the things that stop somebody completing a purchase before the things that improve a score. A checkout that cannot be completed with a keyboard is the failure a consumer takes to the Circuit Court.
5Write down what you did and when. There is no certificate under this Act, so the record is the evidence.

Sources

Free, and the answers stay in your browser

Run the scope test on your own business

Six questions in the order the Regulations ask them: the services, the products, and both limbs of the microenterprise test. It names each duty with the regulation behind it and prints as a document. The answers stay in your browser.

Run the free check

If the answer is that it does reach you

We audit against the standard, fix what is broken, and give you the record of what was done and why. Where a requirement would be a disproportionate burden we write the assessment rather than quietly skipping it, because that is what Regulation 15 asks for.

Accessibility Act compliance

Who wrote this

Oscar Cobbe · Founder, FourWinds Digital

Writes and maintains the legal explainers on this site, and does the compliance work behind them. Every date and article number here is checked against the instrument itself before it is published, and corrected in place when the law moves.

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