Being a microenterprise exempts your website. It does not exempt your shelf.

Directive (EU) 2019/882, the European Accessibility Act, came into Irish law through S.I. No. 636/2023, the European Union (Accessibility Requirements of Products and Services) Regulations 2023. Regulation 1(2) brought the Regulations into operation on 28 June 2025.

The AI Act's high-risk rules now apply from 2 December 2027 for the Annex III uses and 2 August 2028 for AI tied to the Annex I product laws. The Cyber Resilience Act's reporting duty starts in September 2026. This one started on 28 June 2025, and apart from the transitional rules in Regulation 38 its obligations were due on the first day.

A Mason Hayes & Curran survey reported in October 2024 found six in ten of the Irish businesses it surveyed unprepared, and 62% had never run an accessibility audit. Digital Business Ireland published research ten days before the deadline. Of the Irish businesses it surveyed, 49% were still unaware of the requirements, only 35% had started any preparation, and more than 90% had allocated no budget to it.

This article is about the small business exemption. It covers a service, such as a website, and it does not cover the products a business sells.

Regulation 5(4) is one sentence, and it does most of the work: paragraph (3) and Regulation 14 shall not apply to a service provided by a microenterprise.

Both halves of that matter. Paragraph (3) is the main duty. It requires services to meet the accessibility requirements in Parts 3 and 4 of Schedule 1. Regulation 14 contains all of the service provider obligations, including the information duty in Regulation 14(2)(a). A microenterprise providing a service is outside both the standard and the paperwork.

The Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (CCPC), the market surveillance authority here, says so in its own guidance for microenterprises: the requirements and obligations of the European Accessibility Act do not apply to microenterprises providing services.

That is the exemption in full. A three-person consultancy with a booking page owes nothing under these Regulations for that page.

Where it stops matters as much. Regulation 5(4) exempts a service. The product-side duties live in Regulations 8, 10 and 11, and those Regulations contain no turnover threshold and no headcount threshold of any kind. The CCPC says the same thing from the other direction: all businesses, including microenterprises dealing with products, must apply the accessibility requirements of the Act.

Regulation 2 defines a microenterprise as an enterprise which employs fewer than 10 persons and which has an annual turnover not exceeding two million euro or an annual balance sheet total not exceeding two million euro.

Read that carefully, because the 'and' and the 'or' do different jobs. The headcount test and the money test both have to be met. Inside the money test, either measure will do on its own.

Two worked examples. A business with eleven people and a turnover of €300,000 is outside the exemption, because it fails the headcount test and nothing else can rescue it. A business with nine people, €4m of turnover and a balance sheet total of €1.5m is inside it, because the balance sheet alone meets the money test.

Headcount is counted across the business, including any linked or partner companies, in full-time equivalents over a year, not heads on a given day. Under the EU definition of a microenterprise, which the Directive relies on, status changes only once a threshold has been exceeded in two consecutive accounting periods. A tenth hire starts that clock; it does not end the exemption that week.

Regulation 3(1) sets out the products the Regulations apply to, and the list is exhaustive. The CCPC publishes the same six groupings with examples, which is the version worth working from.

If what you sell sits outside these six, it sits outside the product side of the Act however electronic it is. A kettle, a cordless drill and a set of kitchen scales are outside it whatever is inside them.

Two categories reach shops that sell electronics: the fourth and the fifth. A shop selling home routers is dealing in consumer terminal equipment used for electronic communications services. A shop selling smart televisions or streaming boxes is dealing in equipment used to reach audiovisual media services. Both are on the list.

Regulation 11 opens by requiring a distributor to act with due care in relation to the requirements of the Regulations when making a product available on the market. What follows is a checking duty, not an engineering one, and it applies before the product goes out.

What the Regulation asks of a distributor is a finite list, and most of it can be done once per supplier, not once per unit.

If the service exemption does not apply to you, Regulation 5(3) requires services to meet Parts 3 and 4 of Schedule 1, and Regulation 14 applies in full. Two separate duties come out of that.

The first is the site itself. Part 3 requires the website and any app to be perceivable, operable, understandable and robust throughout. For e-commerce, Part 4(g) covers the identification, security and payment functions, and electronic signatures, that sit in the middle of the buying path. A checkout that works with a mouse but fails with a keyboard fails that test. Try yours with a keyboard to find out.

The benchmark is the European standard EN 301 549. Version 3.2.1 includes the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 at level AA in full, and it is the harmonised standard cited under the public sector web accessibility directive. Version 4.1.1, published in September 2026 under the Accessibility Act's own standardisation request, moves to WCAG 2.2 level AA and maps its clauses to the Act. Under Regulation 16, meeting a harmonised standard means you are presumed to comply, but only once its reference is published in the Official Journal. No reference has yet been published under the Accessibility Act. Today the legal requirement is Schedule 1. EN 301 549 at WCAG 2.1 AA is how the market shows it meets that, and WCAG 2.2 AA is where it is heading.

The second duty is Regulation 14(2)(a) with Schedule 3, and it is a written one. Before the service is provided, you prepare information explaining how the service meets the applicable accessibility requirements. Schedule 3 says it goes in the general terms and conditions or an equivalent document. It must include a general description of the service in accessible formats, the explanations needed to understand how the service operates, and a description of how the Schedule 1 requirements are met. Regulation 14(2)(b) requires it to be publicly available in writing and in oral format, in a manner accessible to people with disabilities. Regulation 14(2)(c) requires you to keep it for as long as the service is in operation.

Regulation 3(4) carves five things out of the website and mobile application duties, and they matter because they put a limit on how much you have to fix.

Pre-recorded audio and video (time-based media) published before 28 June 2025 are outside it, as are office file formats published before that date. Online maps and mapping services are outside it, provided that essential information on maps intended for navigational use is given in an accessible digital manner. Third-party content that you neither fund, develop nor control is outside it. And archive content is outside it, meaning pages whose content has stood unchanged since 27 June 2025.

Two further boundaries. Regulation 5(3)(a) leaves urban, suburban and regional transport services outside Part 3, and Regulation 3(2)(d) reaches only their interactive self-service terminals.

And the service list in Regulation 3(2) applies to services provided to consumers. Regulation 2 defines e-commerce services as services 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. A platform that trades only with other businesses, with no consumer route through it, sits outside that definition. Check whether your trading site really is closed to consumers.

Regulation 38 sets three transition periods. None of them is a general grace period running to 2030.

Service contracts agreed before 28 June 2025 may continue without alteration until they expire, capped at five years from that date, which is 28 June 2030. A service provider may also keep using products it was already lawfully using to provide similar services, to the same date. Self-service terminals lawfully used before 28 June 2025 may stay in similar service to the end of their economically useful life, capped at twenty years after entry into use.

Every one of those is about a continuing contract or about kit already installed. A website is neither.

Regulation 15 is the only real relief for a business that is in scope. The accessibility requirements apply only as far as meeting them would not cause either of two things: a fundamental alteration of the basic nature of the product or service, or a disproportionate burden on the operator.

Relying on the second takes an assessment. Regulation 15(3) says the assessment must follow Schedule 4, which is mostly a costing exercise: the ratio of net compliance costs to the overall costs of manufacturing, distributing, importing or providing, the ratio of those costs to net turnover, and named heads for one-off organisational costs and ongoing development costs. It also requires those costs and benefits to be weighed against the estimated benefit to people with disabilities, taking into account how much and how often the product or service is used. Regulation 15(4) then requires you to document the assessment, keep the written record for five years after the product was last made available or the service last provided, and hand over a copy on request.

For services, Regulation 15(7) makes it a living document. You renew it whenever the service is altered, whenever the compliance authority asks, and in any event at least every five years.

Regulation 15(8) is the one that decides whether the argument is available at all. An operator loses the disproportionate burden ground entirely if it has received funding to improve accessibility from any source other than its own resources, public or private. Taking a grant for an accessibility project and then pleading cost is expressly ruled out.

There is a microenterprise relief here, and it is limited. Regulation 15(5) lifts the documentation duty from a microenterprise that deals with products, and Regulation 15(10) lifts the duty to notify the authority that the ground is being relied on. Both only reduce the paperwork that comes with the escape route. They leave the underlying product duties exactly where they were. Regulation 15(6) still lets the CCPC ask you for the facts behind the assessment.

Regulation 32 creates the offences. They include a failure to comply with Regulation 5(1), which is the core duty to place compliant products and provide compliant services, a failure to document or notify under Regulation 15, a failure on the EU declaration of conformity under Regulation 17, misuse of the CE marking, a failure to comply with a direction from an authority, and giving information a person knows or ought reasonably to know is false or misleading in a material respect.

Regulation 32(6) sets the penalties. On summary conviction, a class A fine, which is up to €5,000, or imprisonment for up to six months, or both. On conviction on indictment, a fine of up to €60,000 or imprisonment for up to eighteen months, or both. Regulation 32(7) directs the court to have regard to the seriousness of the failure, the number of units of products or services involved, and the number of people affected.

Arthur Cox and Mason Hayes & Curran both note the imprisonment penalty. Regulation 32 sets no fine of €100,000.

Regulation 33 extends liability to individuals. Where an offence by a body corporate is proved to have been committed with the consent, connivance or approval of a director, manager, secretary or other officer, or to be attributable to that person's wilful neglect, that person also commits the offence and is punished as if personally guilty of it.

Set against that, the CCPC has said publicly that it will take a proportionate approach to regulating the Act, and that it aims to support enterprises, particularly microenterprises and SMEs, in understanding and complying with their obligations. The authorities have had their enforcement powers since 28 June 2025, and the stated posture is help before prosecution.

The first job is to work out where you stand: which side of Regulation 5(4) you fall on, and whether you deal in any of the six product categories. Fixing things comes after that.