European Accessibility Act Compliance Requirements Explained: Bet Hannon

>> AMBER HINDS: Welcome to WordPress Accessibility Meetup, Beyond Technical Accessibility: European Accessibility Act Compliance Requirements with Bet Hannon, who’s the CEO at AccessiCart. I’m going to fly through these announcements, so we have lots of time for our presentation. If you have not been before, we have a Facebook group. This is a great way to connect between meetups. You can find it if you go to facebook.com/groups/wordpress.accessibility. You can also find upcoming events and past recordings in one place if you go to equalizedigital.com/meetup. Yes, this is being recorded. It takes about two weeks, and we will have the full video with corrected captions, a full transcript, and a written summary up at that URL. You can also get notified when the recording is available if you join our email list. You can do that if you go to equalizedigital.com/focus-state. The other way that we release these recordings is via our podcast, which you can find at accessibilitycraft.com. If you prefer to listen, you can listen, and you don’t have to watch if you go there. If you have any suggestions for the meetup or you need any additional accommodation to make it work for you, please contact us at meetup@equalizedigital.com.

I am Amber Hinds. I’m the CEO of Equalized Digital. We are the organizer of the WordPress Accessibility Meetup. We are a mission-driven organization and a corporate member of the IAAP, which is the International Association of Accessibility Professionals, and we are focused on WordPress Accessibility. We have a WordPress plugin called Accessibility Checker that helps you find and fix problems on your site. We also offer online courses for NVDA and VoiceOver screen reader testing. We do accessibility audits, remediation, and consulting. You can learn more about us if you go to equalizedigital.com.

Thank you to our sponsor for live captioning and post-event transcription. Today’s sponsor is Kinsta. Kinsta provides managed hosting services for WordPress. It is powering over 120,000 businesses worldwide, and based on user reviews, it is the highest-rated managed WordPress host on G2. Kinsta has everything you need, including an unbeatable combination of speed, security, and expert support, powered by Google Cloud and the fastest C3D and C2 servers combined with CDN and Edge Caching. Your sites are secured with Cloudflare Enterprise, protecting you from DDoS attacks. All plans include free migrations, and the first month of starter plans is completely free, so you can try the service risk-free.

You can learn more about Kinsta if you go to kinsta.com. That’s K-I-N-S-T-A.com. We always ask if you are willing, on whatever social media platform you are on, to please thank our sponsor for sponsoring captions and transcription for the event, so that they know it is important and valuable to have these accessibility features. That helps them to want to continue sponsoring. If you’re willing to give them a post, or a comment, or a tweet, or whatever, just saying thanks for sponsoring WordPress Accessibility Meetup, that helps our meetup. Thank you.

Two upcoming events to be aware of. On Tuesday, April 21st, in the same time slot, we will be doing a presentation with Donata Stroink-Skillrud, who is from Termageddon. She will be presenting Training Support Staff on Accessibility. If you are wondering what training you need to do to make sure your support can provide accessible support, this is a presentation for you.

Then, on Thursday, May 7th, in the same time slot, we will have a presenter, Nora Guy, who will be presenting Elevating the Web: An Adventure in Web Accessibility. This should be a really fun presentation because she is going to be doing it through the lens of Pixar movies like Up. It’ll be a fun, interesting. Her partner works at Pixar, and she is an accessibility specialist at a bank, so it’ll be a nice mix of animation, storytelling, and accessibility.

I am very excited to introduce our speaker today, Bet Hannon. Bet Hannon, who has a CPACC, or C-P-A-C-C, is the CEO of AccessiCart, which is a services agency that helps eCommerce brands remove barriers for customers with disabilities and meet web accessibility compliance requirements, like the ADA and, yes, the EAA, or the European Accessibility Act, which she is going to speak about today.

AccessiCart specializes in testing, consulting, and reporting alongside existing website teams to level up skills and educate regarding compliance. When not working, Bet enjoys cooking, Irish whiskey, and hiking and snowshoeing near Bend, Oregon, where she lives. Also, it doesn’t say this here, but Bet is on the board of the WP Accessibility Day Conference with me, and she and I have been friends for quite a long time. I’m just so happy to have her here to speak. Welcome, Bet.

>> BET HANNON: Thanks. It’s great to be here today. You’re ready for me to share.

>> AMBER: Yes. A quick note, while you are getting your sharing set up, I am going to continue working to make sure we can get our human-generated captions, so I will post about that. For everyone watching, please look for the Q&A module. We will come at the end and do questions and answers. I’ll let you take it away, Bet.

>> BET: Awesome. Great. Thanks, Amber. It is good to be here with you all today. People who follow me on social media will know that I have been nerding out over the last year or two around EAA compliance pieces and learning about what’s happening. Here’s our roadmap today. I should first off say that we are not going to talk about any technical accessibility today. If you’re new to accessibility, you’re looking for information about how to start implementing accessibility, you should go back through some of those previous meetup videos that Amber spoke about just a bit ago.

We’ll start off today talking a little bit about what is the European Accessibility Act and the fact that it’s not just one law. We’ll talk about who has to comply. Spoiler alert: Some US businesses will need to comply. Then we’ll talk about what compliance looks like. Beyond those technical pieces, beyond making things accessible, what other pieces are there? Then, enforcement for EAA began last summer at the end of June, so we’re starting to see what some of that early enforcement looks like.

I think that’s a really helpful context for everyone to have, especially if you are needing to motivate clients or team members. I’m going to spend actually a good chunk talking about what this enforcement is starting to look like and what we are seeing out in the wild in terms of the enforcement. Then I’m absolutely planning on some time for Q&A at the end.

While we’ll be talking about laws and legal matters today, I want to say right up front, I’m not an attorney. You should seek out the advice of your own attorney, either as a site owner, or as a freelancer or agency, you should be talking to your own attorneys if you have about your own legal compliance. Today, I’m just simply going to be speaking out of my own experience with AccessiCard, our clients, and then what I’m understanding from interacting with attorneys, companies, and brands that are working on their compliance with EAA.

The European Accessibility Act is bringing some big changes for web accessibility all over the world. Like most other accessibility laws, this law is based in human rights laws. The aim is to give equal access to everyone, including people with disabilities, to digital services and products. EAA was actually first passed in 2019, and enforcement went into effect on June 28, 2025.

What we call the European Accessibility Act is actually, in EU law, a directive. Directives set the scope and minimum thresholds for each EU member state, and then each nation creates their own transposed law underneath that directive umbrella. Sometimes that’s a little difficult for us Americans to wrap our heads around, but it means that Germany has their own law under EAA, France has their own law, and Italy. Every nation has their own separate law under EAA.

Theoretically, EAA was intended to harmonize or bring together various accessibility requirements around digital accessibility, commerce, trade. In the short term, every nation is just a little bit different with those requirements. We’ll talk in a little bit about how multinational companies are starting to deal with these differences. Among other things, it means that every country has their own enforcement agency.

The English translation that often gets used is market surveillance authority, which I think sounds like spycraft to American ears, but their enforcement agency or the oversight agency, market surveillance authority, those are all the same thing. That agency is the one that receives the complaints, may proactively look for non-compliance, but also metes out legal orders and enforces the EAA. Nationally, there’s systems that are emerging of legal orders, fines, and penalties that are a part of this enforcement system. That’s the big picture.

Who has to comply? The big picture is that any companies, any brands, anybody that sells products and services to EU citizens, no matter where those companies are located, must comply if they have a digital interface that’s a part of that marketing, selling, or delivering those products or services. This includes eCommerce sites explicitly, but it would also include things like scheduling pages or customer interface dashboards.

Initially, we were hearing that more generic marketing sites might not fall into scope, but more recently, I’m hearing that brands and companies are telling us that their attorneys have advised them that even the marketing sites themselves, especially when they have information about products or things like newsletter signups, those must also be made compliant. Like GDPR, this applies to US and other non-EU businesses. No matter where you are, if you’re selling to EU citizens, then you have a compliance requirement.

Now, there is an exclusion for microenterprises. If the business does less than €2 million in annual revenue, that’s about $2.3 million this week, or they have less than 10 employees, then they’re exempted, at least for the time being. I think at some point, some of those thresholds may be reduced, but the bigger risk or the bigger thing to think about is that businesses often grow. While a business may be exempt now, they may outgrow that exemption, so as clients who are exempt now come up for a redesign or redevelopment project, it’s really a good idea to include accessibility as a part of that for future-proofing in case they outgrow this exemption.

There are lots and lots of requirements, pieces of the EAA that you may want to learn about. EAA covers a lot more than just websites. It includes things like hardware, electronic hardware, e-readers, mobile phones, public kiosks, a lot of travel-related things. Today, I’m really going to focus and talk on the most relevant requirements for people creating and managing websites.

Consumer-facing websites, especially eCommerce, payments, anything that gives product or services information, must meet EN 301 549. That’s the norm for accessibility. Right now that norm references WCAG, Website Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 AA. Right now, EN 301 549 has a few things, but we can think about it as equivalent with WCAG 2.1 AA.

That process, though, EN 301 548 is in process of being updated. The expectation is that it will shift to cite 2.2 AA sometime this coming summer. I think for a lot of folks, when you’re working with clients, you’re going to want to be focusing on 2.2 as a way of future-proofing it because that requirement is really soon to change. Again, there are questions about internal requirements in terms of internal websites. EAA may cover some of those under different employment sections, but I’m focusing mostly today on the things that are more customer or consumer-facing.

EAA covers products and services that have any kind of digital or communications aspect. For example, if you have a product like a room humidifier, but it has a companion app, that app must be accessible. Information about that accessibility must be provided on the website pre-purchase. For example, let’s think about a hosting company. A hosting company is selling hosting services to EU citizens. To be able to use those services, you have to be able to log in and use a dashboard that has all kinds of UI interface to it. That dashboard has to be accessible, and you have to give information about its accessibility before the purchase.

The same would hold true, for example, for an online course. You would have to show that you have some kind of way that people are going to be able to use this. It includes things like any documents. I think a lot of products have user manuals that are PDFs. They’ve just always been PDFs. Those PDFs must also be accessible. I think most folks here today understand that PDF accessibility is its own unique specialty and cause for issues as well.

Additionally, sites must include accessibility statements. For most countries, or a lot of them anyway, they must contain specific information on how the users or the consumer can report an accessibility barrier to the company. They have to have a way, a mechanism, an email address, something, for the consumer to report an issue. Then, if it’s not resolved, which Oversight Authority, so what’s the next step? If you don’t feel like we’ve resolved your issue, then you need to contact this particular Oversight Authority.

Be aware that in some countries, like France, Germany, Poland, others, they require detailing the remaining unremediated accessibility issues that are on the site. You have to have a detailed list of the issues that have been identified and remain on your website unremediated. In France, that list must also include expected remediation date or the plan for fixing those issues. The expectation is those won’t be there forever, but you’ve got a date you’re committing to moving this forward.

It’s worth noting that this is a highly problematic conflict for US-based businesses. US-based businesses would never outline remaining accessibility issues on their website because this could so easily be abused by the serial plaintiff law firms. This is a situation where the company would definitely want to consult their own attorney about that particular situation.

Maybe they will figure out how much of their revenue is coming from Europe versus the US, or maybe they will figure out they need to have a separate website for EU versus US. Figuring out what you’re going to do, what has to be in the accessibility statement, based on the countries where you’re doing business. Then, in some countries, the date that the accessibility statement was last changed is required. There’s an expectation that that accessibility statement is going to be and going to need to be regularly updated.

A not very well-known requirement of EAA is that businesses should be self-reporting the remaining issues on their websites, and not just the websites, but their other digital assets, like apps and documents, to the market surveillance or Oversight Authority. This is a part of the EAA umbrella directive. It looks like not every country implemented that particular requirement in their transposed law. We assume that this will catch up over the next couple of years, that the ones that somehow overlook that will come back.

We do know, for example, that the Netherlands has a specific form for making that report. Germany, Spain, and other countries that require this reporting have not yet indicated how the self-report should be made. That’s pretty much just through their normal communication channels, but you’re supposed to be reporting the unremediated issues on your website.

It’s important to understand that this self-reporting is not a one-and-done report. The Netherlands, in particular, expects, in their law, that if you find a critical or serious issue on your site, that it will be reported to within one week. Other severity levels must be reported within 30 days. Items that are fixed within that time frame don’t have to be reported. If you find a critical issue, but you fix it within a week, then it doesn’t have to be reported.

I think it’s fascinating to think about the carrot and stick that have been used here. What they are clearly hoping is that website teams that find an issue, or when an issue is reported to them, they will say to themselves, “Oh,” some other expletive, “we don’t want to have to report that and do all that paperwork. Let us just fix that,” which should go a long way, we think, to preventing accessibility issues from stacking up in the backlog queue, as they frequently do currently. They’re really hoping that it will change the way that accessibility issues are approached, that it will be much more quickly remediated when they’re discovered.

Note that if you neglect or avoid the self-reporting and later on an issue is escalated, reported to you, and comes to the Oversight Authority, now you have two legal violations. Your website’s not accessible under the EAA law there, and you failed to do the required self-reporting. Two violations there. While it’s not explicitly a part of the law that regular testing be happening, it is a strongly implied assumption that there will be regular testing, both automated and manual testing of the website.

Some countries require for their government and public sector sites the date of the last accessibility audit be published in the accessibility statement. There’s, I think, some conversation around the edges about whether that may become a requirement for other eCommerce and other EAA sites in scope of EAA as well. There’s a sense that you should be doing regular testing. It’s not a legal requirement, but it’s required to be able to do all the rest of these things.

Under that EAA directive, every nation has their own law, and there are differences between those laws in some of the requirements. For instance, how long do you have to reply to a consumer complaint? In some countries, that’s less than two weeks. In other countries, it’s three weeks or almost 30 days in some cases. What needs to go into your accessibility statement? That differs by nation. If you sell into multiple nations, if you have customers in multiple nations, which laws do you follow?

This is absolutely something that companies should consult their attorneys about. The companies that we’re talking to seem to be getting either the advice that they should choose the nation where they have the largest revenue or the biggest customer footprint, or that they should sort through these and figure out, kind of a hodgepodge of choose the strictest rules, no matter which countries those come from, so that you will be sure you’re complying with the rest. I’m sure that people are pushing back on some of that, but it is a big question about how multinational companies are going to deal with all of this.

I’m sure there are some other things about compliance. I think I’ve covered most of the bigger pieces of that compliance. There are a lot of little things, but I think it can be helpful to move on to look at what does enforcement look like. It’s important to understand that that’s still unfolding. The official enforcement just started at the end of June last summer, and we’re going to talk about some more specifics in a moment, but what I want to describe is the general pattern of what we’re seeing so far in terms of getting an enforcement action started.

It’s important to know that that enforcement action starting can come from a variety of places. Every nation allows for individual consumers or users to report barriers, nations allow for them, and all of them allow for advocacy groups for consumers or persons with disabilities to report barriers. It can come from either of those. Then the Oversight Authority can take their own proactive accessibility testing and auditing. They’re not just relying on consumers or advocacy groups to make complaints.

Then in Germany also allows for your competitors to file a complaint. Their rationale is that this levels the playing field because it’s not fair for one competitor to invest in making things accessible and the other to profit by avoiding the law, so complaints can be filed. Complaints can be filed from all these different places. The enforcement action can start from all these different places.

Every country has a little bit different deadlines for making reply to the complainant. For instance, in France, they must acknowledge receipt of the complaint within 10 days and then provide a substantive response or a plan for remediation within 30 days. That’s going to be different country to country, but there’s some kind of a deadline window there.

If the issue is not replied to or resolved within that legal window, then the complaint can be escalated to the market surveillance or Oversight Authority, or the complainant can choose to escalate directly into the court system. This has happened in France. I’ll talk about that in just a bit. Then, again, the Oversight Authority can initiate their own auditing, so things can start at that level. If they don’t come to go directly to court, they can go to the oversight authorities.

When the Oversight Authority gets involved, it seems mostly that they are not jumping directly to penalties. What they are doing is giving an initial legal order to make it accessible by a specific date. The complaint gets escalated, they do their due diligence, looking at the evidence there, they say, “Make it accessible. Make it conform to EN 301 549,” by X date.

Some of the attorneys that I’ve talked to think that this is an early transition period and that, especially if companies seem to be trying to skirt the compliance, that this initial grace period to comply may go away. Ultimately, what they want is for people to make things accessible. It may be that this early, we’re not going to give you a penalty at first, we’re giving you this window to make it accessible, that that may go away or certainly get shorter.

What we don’t know yet is how realistic those windows will be. Will they, for instance, require conformance from a large eCommerce site within 30 days? Which is probably not logistically feasible. The windows will almost certainly be much shorter than the site owner or the company would really like. That short window is going to get more expensive because they’ll have to pay more to get the work done in a short window, and they’ll have to put aside any other priorities while they’re scrambling to get this remediation done.

Most of us always tell prospective clients, the most cost-effective way to meet compliance is going to be to start early on your own timeline before you’re forced to do so. We have this window. What happens if they don’t get this site, the app, or the document into conformance by the deadline? This varies quite a bit depending on the country and their specific laws, but here are some of the highlights. It seems like in most countries, what we’re seeing so far are daily fines for missing the deadline. They’re starting at around €1,000 a day but can kick up and much higher. We’ll talk about a case where it was much higher in just a bit.

If that doesn’t motivate compliance, then there are other penalties that can kick in. A lot of these that are more kind of one-time, bigger penalties, they start at around €60,000. In Italy, however, the fines can be as much as 5% of the previous year’s gross global annual revenue. That’s a way of trying to level the playing field between bigger companies and smaller companies, but that could be a big chunk of a fine if that has to happen.

In Ireland, the CEO of the company can receive up to 18 months of jail time. Now, to get jail time, the company has to essentially refuse to implement accessibility, but it does give you a sense for how seriously some nations are taking some of this. Ultimately, the biggest piece is that countries can revoke your right to sell into their country, to sell products and services to EU citizens. Then, to be allowed to sell to them again, the assumption would be that you would not only have to show that you had made everything accessible but that you have plans for maintaining that accessibility as well. It could get painful, I think, if you don’t comply.

Let’s talk about what we’re actually seeing in terms of enforcement. That’s the big picture of what’s going on, but let’s talk about some specific cases now. There are consumer complaints happening, but since they don’t tend to be public, we don’t get to see them, or we don’t hear about them. Oversight authorities are reporting that complaints are happening and that they are processing them. That’s how we know that complaints are happening.

In France, near the end of last summer, two advocacy groups on behalf of persons who are blind partnered together with a third organization that’s a human rights legal organization, and they filed complaints with four major grocery store chains over their websites and apps. When they did so, they filed very public press releases that included specific examples of barriers that were found, with quotes from blind consumers about how difficult it was to shop online or use the websites.

As you might imagine, the potential for this happening is a huge negative hit for reputations of the brand. The takeaway is that brands and site owners should not assume that complaints will be private. There’s nothing to stop a consumer from also announcing that they filed a complaint with a company. You might assume if you’re the business owner that things could get public really quickly.

You would think that that would motivate businesses to get their acts together, right? No. These four grocery chains have mostly ignored the complaints so far. In fact, the advocacy groups reported that they have responded with a distinct indifference. Among other things, one of the grocery store chains said, “Yes, we’ll take accessibility into consideration when we next redevelop our website in late 2026.” It’s like, “Wow.” In the fall, then these advocacy groups escalated the issue by filing in court asking for what’s called a summary injunction.

Basically, they came, they brought their evidence to the court. They said, “Here’s the evidence. Here’s the law under the French transposition of EAA. Tell those grocers to make it accessible.” The court could order them a court-ordered date to make it accessible. There have been multiple court dates for this injunction proceeding that keep getting postponed. It’s not entirely clear why that is happening, but we continue to watch this case. I think the big picture takeaway is public complaints about how your brand is excluding people with disabilities are probably not going to be great for your brand.

In Sweden, they announced in November that their Oversight Authority has started proactive accessibility auditing of large eCommerce sites. They announced that in this first round, so that implies there will be future rounds, more rounds of auditing, that they would be focusing on the homepage, a product page, and the search function. We’re monitoring these enforcement actions, but as we’re thinking about them, it’s easy to take them, getting them isolated, so I thought it might be helpful to look at a few countries, just by country, to think more about how enforcement might continue to unfold.

Let’s talk about the Netherlands. I’m a little nervous because Rian’s here. Maybe she’ll help me flesh this out later. As I mentioned before, the Oversight Authority in the Netherlands has a specific self-reporting form on their website. Barriers at this critical or serious level have to be reported within a week. Other severity levels reported within 30 days. Some companies have already gotten letters informing them of remediation deadlines. We assume these are most likely originated with consumer complaints. We know that the authority has given letters informing companies you must make your site accessible by this date.

The agency announced in February, so just a few weeks ago, that companies who are either missing or who have weak self-reporting would be prioritized for auditing by the oversight agency. If you thought that ignoring that self-reporting would let you fly under the radar, that is not going to happen, or if you thought doing a little performative bit of self-reporting would get you out of the crosshairs, that’s not happening. They also announced that they expect to begin a full-scale auditing program by sometime in April or May, so coming up soon, this month or next. Gives you an idea of how things are beginning to move along in the Netherlands.

Now, not every country created a new Oversight Authority. Some countries folded these new law enforcement responsibilities into existing agencies. Ireland is one. They assigned responsibility for EAA to their Commission for Consumer Regulation or ComReg. This agency reported at the February IAAP, International Association of Accessibility Professionals conference in Dublin, that they are already in the process of processing consumer complaints.

I think one of the most interesting pieces of information that they shared was that their EAA division is partnering closely with the consumer care division, because what they discovered was that a lot of times, consumers did not know the law about accessibility, didn’t reference accessibility, but what they were reporting was an accessibility problem. It turned out that the problem they had was really related to the accessibility of something.

When the consumer reports a problem that turns out to be accessibility, they are proactively triggering EAA enforcement proceedings as a part of that. I think that’s a really interesting way to begin to see how some countries are really taking this quite seriously in terms of moving forward with accessibility EAA enforcement.

Here’s an interesting one. Norway is not a member of the EU, but they are part of the European Economic Area. Because of that, they do implement or enact a lot of EU laws. They have accessibility law essentially under EAA. That Norwegian Oversight Authority late last summer audited a health platform called HelsaMi. They originally found 119 accessibility violations, and they gave them about 4 months to get it remediated.

The deadline for that was on August 8. On August 8, 64 violations remain unfixed, so the directorate notified the health platform that they had until December 19. They had 11 days further to meet those accessibility guidelines, or that missing that deadline would start daily fines of kr50,000. That’s a little over $5,000 a day. They eventually got the platform into conformance by December 23.

This is an example that shows that when these oversight agencies are giving a legal order to remediate on a deadline as that first action, when that remediation is not completed, not taken seriously, at least some of these agencies will not be shy about imposing fines. I think the takeaway is if you get a legal order to get things remediated, it should be taken as a serious deadline, or things could get expensive for you.

Here are just a few more. Just for context, these four countries, Poland, Romania, Hungary, the Czech Republic, I think it’s fair to say they are not generally known as huge fans of EU regulation. They kind of not super excited about a lot of the regulation that comes out of the EU. Even for countries that are not big on EU rules, Poland and Romania are requiring self-reporting right out of the gate, plus that plans for remediation have to be a part of that reporting. Not only do you have to self-report the issues that remain unremediated, you have to include what’s your plan for fixing that.

Poland and Romania is about self-reporting. In Hungary, the accessibility statement must include details of the remaining issues and plans for remediation. I find this really interesting because I’ve not seen it in any other country so far. The Czech Republic, the Oversight Authority announced that they plan to publish a list of non-compliant, inaccessible products and services on their website.

Now, there is some pushback from businesses in the EU within them about overregulation. One of the attorneys I talked to talked about regulation fatigue. There is some pushback, in particular around things around privacy and accessibility. I think the general consensus among folks who work in accessibility in the EU is that enforcement and plans for future enforcement are clearly robust at the moment.

At the IAAP big meeting in Dublin in February, it was announced that the Article 28 working group is up and running. Now, Article 28 of the EAA is the article that focuses on transitions and implementations. This working group has representatives from all the member nation oversight authorities, as well as persons with disabilities and some other stakeholders. This group is tasked with working together to do some coordination, some harmonization, some cooperation across national borders.

One of the really big announcements from this group was that they are information-sharing with one another about companies with violations or who are the subject of enforcement actions. Companies should not assume that if they receive an enforcement action, say, in France, that it will stay only within France. They should assume that there may be parallel enforcement actions or other enforcement actions for other countries where they do business, when information sharing is happening between those enforcement agencies. I think that represents a huge push for the way that this will be a very robust enforcement around this.

Here are just some thoughts that you may want to take into consideration beyond technical implementation. Absolutely, work on the technical accessibility, but some other things that need to be in process with companies that are there, that is, figure out your process for a complaint early. Some national laws, say, France, only give you 10 days to reply when there’s a consumer complaint. France, again, gives you 30 days to either get it resolved or have a substantive way that it’s going to get resolved.

You do not want to waste time when you get a consumer complaint, trying to figure out what your process needs to be, who’s going to reply, do you need to talk to an attorney, which attorney, do you need to get an attorney, all of those pieces. You don’t want to be scrambling at the last minute when a complaint comes in, because eventually a complaint will come. We know that no site is 100% accessible, so you’re going to get a complaint. Figure out what that process is going to be so that you can minimize the headache that it will be in a larger way.

Then you need to get your support team trained with this process, whoever will be receiving these complaints. In your accessibility statement, you’re going to tell people what they need to do to file a complaint. Is it that it needs to be through a specific email address, for instance? Whoever’s going to be receiving these, and your support team needs to know how those are going to get filed.

Does the person need to specifically file through a specific email address? They should be ready to give that email address. What information might they need to collect to move forward? Should they be the ones that are collecting that? Should they be helping the customer initiate that? Don’t let it fall off the radar because the support folks don’t know what’s supposed to happen in terms of this process.

Then you’re also going to want to train your support folks to be alert for any customer complaints or feedback that could be accessibility related, kind of like that Irish authority. Just because the consumer did not lead off with a reference to EAA does not mean that the complaint can’t be escalated later. If it’s an accessibility issue and their complaint is not getting addressed, it can be escalated to the Oversight Authority later. You want to be proactive about being alert to things that could be accessibility issues.

The big piece is just start documenting everything. In reality, this is good advice for US businesses relative to ADA lawsuits, too. If you get a complaint in the EU under the EAA, if you get a complaint, you need to be able to demonstrate to show to the Oversight Authority that you have not been ignoring or skirting the law. You need to be able to show that you’ve been making good faith efforts, even if you’re not totally there yet, whatever totally there yet means. Accessibility is always something that has to be maintained. You need to be able to show that you have been working at this, making good faith efforts.

Additionally, when there is a complaint, you need to know that the company will be asked for all of the interactions around the complaint by the Oversight Authority. The interactions that happened with that consumer, the back and forth, the emails, notes of the phone call, whatever that is, but also the interactions internally. You need to have a process for documenting these complaints because you’re going to have to share that documentation, and you need to clue your staff into the fact that the Oversight Authority will be reading all of this.

You don’t want to have someone on your team spout off in a moment of frustration, “Why do blind people even need to buy our products?” Or something. That would not be a great look at all. Make sure everybody understands these are going to be reviewed, and we want to be sure that we’re not opening up more cans of worms, but also that we’re taking this seriously. It’s easier to pull all this documentation together if you’re just regularly doing it. You make a habit of doing it, rather than scrambling at the last minute, trying to pull all of this together from all the places where it has happened over time.

You want to start pulling together in a safe place, a special folder on Google Drive, OneDrive, or whatever that is, any audits that you’ve had done. Ideally, the whole picture of all the audits you’ve done, even way before. Any automated testing reports that you might get. Your self-reported issues. When you self-report issues to the authority, you want to keep copies of that. If you’re emailing it in on their contact form because that’s how they’re telling you to do it at the moment, be sure you’re keeping copies of that. Any issue or remediation logs, especially dates and who fixed what, showing progress that issues are being tracked, new issues are being found, and issues are being remediated.

When you think about that accessibility statement and the fact that you’re finding a new issue, so you’re putting that into your accessibility statement, maybe with a plan for when it’s going to be remediated, and then you get it remediated, you come back, you take that off. You need to have versioning of your accessibility statement because that may become an issue that you need to show the accessibility statement that was on your site as of a certain date.

If you hire outside vendors, you need to keep all of their reports and documentation to you, any advice that they’re giving you, all of that piece and any training that you’ve gotten for anybody on your team, whether those are developers, designers, content managers, or support folks, keeping track of all of the training that you’ve gotten for your folks.

Some of that sort of documentation is the kind of thing that AccessiCart provides in our plans. There are going to be other people that are providing some of that, too. It’s not super onerous. People can do this on there. It’s a DIY thing, but it can be a pain that somebody may want to outsource. I suspect there will be other people that are providing that sort of documentation as a part of what they’re doing.

Another thing that we’re doing is doing some consulting to help them figure out the processes, figure out who needs to get trained, pointing them toward resources, building prioritized plans, and there will be other companies that are coming along to do that, if not already. I think it’s just helpful to know sometimes companies are feeling like it’s a lot, they’re overwhelmed, they don’t know, and they can’t figure out even where to start. I think it’s helpful to know that there are people that can help them, like a lot of folks in this meetup, probably, to help move folks along.

I always like to point out, at some point in a presentation, that accessibility is just always the right thing to do. It is being a good human to include people with disabilities, to not exclude them, even by just our ignorance. It’s also the law. It makes good business sense to improving your user experience and your SEO. We’re going to have some time for questions, a little bit of questions, I hope, but if someone would rather have a more confidential chat about accessibility, including folks who need referrals to attorneys in the EU that have experience with EAA or getting experience with EAA, don’t hesitate to reach out.

I hope this has been helpful today. I’m looking forward to your questions. Thanks for listening.

>> AMBER: Thank you so much, Bet. Obviously, it’s always interesting to hear the scary stuff, but I love all the actionable tips that you presented there, especially around documenting things. It’s interesting, I never thought about version controlling your accessibility statement. In my head, when you said that, I was like, “That makes total sense,” because it is legally required in Europe.

In the US, it’s like a nice thing, but it’s interesting. Then in my head, I was like, “Okay, what are the best ways to do that?” I’m like, “Well, you could have it sync with like a Git repo,” or you could just go to the Wayback Machine and be like, “Take a screenshot of my page,” before you change it every time, so you have it like in a third– I don’t know. Do you have thoughts on that? How would you version control that?

>> BET: I think in some places there’s a sense in which you should put the date that it was last revised. I think in a lot of places that’s not required, but I think it makes sense to do it, in terms of your own, trying to figure out your versioning and all of that.

>> AMBER: WordPress does have the whole last updated date, which you can output. The slight downside on that is if you were just like, “Oh, I need to add a comma,” it would change the updated date. Anytime you save the post would do it, which might not actually be the same as changing the actual context of the accessibility statement.

Folks, if you have any questions and you want to put them in the Q&A, I am going to pass them along to Bet. It did look like Sharon asked a question, which is, what is the legal culture around lawsuits in Europe? Is it as predatorial as the US?

>> BET: My sense is no. As the French example shows, there are some lawsuits, but it’s not nearly the same sort of litigious, anybody can sue you kind of thing. It tends to be more of a– I don’t know how that’s all going to shake out. I thought it was really interesting, the French folks going straight to the court. There are provisions in some of these laws to get damages. The French groups could have started a court proceeding in a way that would have led to some kind of damages payout for blind consumers, their blind members, but they didn’t. This is more just like a public benefit, “We want the court to tell them to make it right.” Some interesting differences there.

>> AMBER: I’ll post a link too if folks find it helpful. We have a blog post that I did a ton of research, which required translating a lot of documents into English from whatever they were originally in. I was specifically looking into that, trying to figure out, do many of these country laws under the EAA allow for civil damages? For the most part, there were very few that explicitly say that’s what it is. I think Germany was one of the ones. I think I’ve heard that Germany also has more on the privacy side, where they allow that as well.

>> BET: Yes. Germany and France, I think.

>> AMBER: I feel like there won’t probably be, and there hasn’t historically been the same kind of, “We can make money off this,” like we see here in the United States.

>> BET: Right. I think really there’s a different kind of, these oversight authorities have the legal role of giving these– They’re basically giving a legal order. There are some enforcement agencies. The Environmental Protection Agency here in the United States used to do that sort of thing. They can issue fines. I don’t know if there’s the same kind of pushback for those, where companies would take them to court to get that overturned or something like that. Some of it is just we’ll have to wait and see how all of this is unfolding.

>> AMBER: Yes, because even though the official enforcement was June of last year, it’s not like a light switch.

>> BET: No, [crosstalk] it takes a while for things. Some nations clearly had been working on getting their enforcement agency responsibilities worked out. Clearly, the Netherlands is way out ahead. Some other countries, they barely got their transposed law done at the end of 2024. It’s taking a while for some other countries still.

>> AMBER: Lucas posted in the chat. He said, “I did file a complaint against a German airline last year, and the options for compensation was not a thing. It’s more about force the company to comply with the law.”

>> BET: That’s my impression, is that it’s more focused on that.

>> AMBER: The other thing I’ve seen, this was actually quite a while ago, a number of years ago, because for some transportation things, there have been more requirements around accessibility for quite a long time, I remember seeing something related to an airline in Europe, where it wasn’t necessarily just a fine, but they also lost government subsidies-

>> BET: It was in Spain.

>> AMBER: -and tax breaks. That in and of itself could be even more expensive than the fine.

>> BET: Oh, absolutely. Yes, over the last bit, there’s a focus on travel. A lot of EAA is kiosks for travel, checking in, buying tickets, those kinds of things. There was a lot of focus on that. What I’m hearing from some of the enforcement agencies and from some of the attorneys is that there’s a focus. In some of those agencies, the enforcement agencies are focusing on eCommerce because that’s a big piece of the digital law.

Some of them are beginning to think about banking and finance. That’s another place, banking and finance. In Sweden, you get the health platform, so health-related stuff. Accessibility touches all of these things. All of those things have real-life impacts for people with disabilities. We want to make sure that they’re able to do the things they need to do with all of those platforms.

>> AMBER: I’m glad they’re including eCommerce now, because honestly, if I were to admit how frequently I buy a product online, it might be almost daily, which is horrible for the planet, I’m sure, but it is so common. I’m just like, “I couldn’t imagine not having the ability to do that,” when you’ve got kids, a job, and whatever other things make it difficult to get to a store. Everyone should be able to do that.

>> BET: Absolutely. Do your banking-

>> AMBER: Vanessa had–

>> BET: -and do all those other things. Yes, go ahead. Another question.

>> AMBER: Vanessa had a question. She said, “I’m curious about the Netherlands and their agency that will begin the full-scale auditing soon. How will they do this using an automated scanner that only catches 30% of the issues, or are they hiring staff for manual auditing for millions of websites?” Have you read anything about what their approach is going to be?

>> BET: No, I have not.

>> AMBER: Perhaps Rian could write in the chat if she does, also.

>> BET: Yes. Rian may have more information, but I don’t know much, other than that they were planning to do that. I do know that some agencies that have started their proactive testing, they’re not relying just on automated testing. They have some folks that are doing auditing for some manual testing.

>> AMBER: Yes, I did see Rian put a note that she hasn’t heard. For folks who don’t know, Rian is in the Netherlands and is an amazing accessibility specialist in that country and Europe, and all around the world. She is a great person to follow as well on European Accessibility Act. Thanks.

>> BET: Absolutely.

>> AMBER: Of course, I have not read anything about how their plan is, but my guess would be they’re going to start with automated testing because it’s really easy, especially nowadays, to create a crawler. A great example of this is The WebAIM Million, which is literally a crawler that– they don’t manually go test a million homepages for accessibility.

>> BET: No. No, no, no.

>> AMBER: They have built something that goes out, fetches the URL, scans it with their WAVE rules, and then puts the report in a database. I can only assume that’s how countries are going to handle, at least essential–

>> BET: Well, they will start there, but the EAA is very clear that automated testing, automated overlays that rely on that automation under the hood, that is not enough to get compliance. I am assuming that they will start with some automated, but very quickly, it will escalate. It doesn’t take much to– they run the automated and then when they start to tell people, “You got problems. You’d better fix all of these,” that I think it would be irresponsible for the company to assume that only fix the things that can be found by automated testing. I think it’s going to very quickly escalate to doing more manual testing.

It is a really interesting question, as to will these oversight bodies– I do know that some of them are hiring folks, but how big will that get? What kind of enforcement is there? What kind of funding do they get for that?

>> AMBER: I have experience in the US with– we’ve worked a couple of times with higher ed institutions that were doing mandated remediation because they got in trouble with the Office of Civil Rights, which used to be part of the Department of Education here. The thing that I always thought was really interesting because we would get on calls with– they were actually attorneys who work at the Office of Civil Rights. They’re government employees that have a law degree and are licensed attorneys. They had been trained on how to use NVDA.

They were actually manually reviewing websites, but their volume at which they were doing it, they weren’t going out and crawling. It was more when they would get a complaint. A student would say, “Something’s wrong with this. My college won’t fix it,” or whatever, and file it with the Office of Civil Rights. Then they would take this small complaint, and they would go like, “Okay, now we’re going to do an audit of your website.” They would do the audit of the website and be like, “These are all the things that we found that you’d have to fix.” It definitely went way beyond automated [unintelligible 01:02:48].

>> BET: Oh, yes, for sure. Yes, somebody just posted higher ed courses taking content down. I think that happens. That may happen for e-commerce sites, too, when they’re dealing with stuff, right? Could just take things down, but I think the assumption needs to be that you need to think about, move through, use that automated testing, get the low-hanging fruit that the automated testing is going to identify for you, and then move on to getting other things going, too, if you’re going to DIY that, but even some very light manual auditing would not be a bad idea. You need to know if you have keyboard navigation issues or screen reader issues on things. That’s important to find those early, yes.

>> AMBER: I can imagine that also doing user testing is really beneficial. Any business that wants to make money off their website, the thing that’s neat about user testing is you’ll get accessibility feedback, but you sometimes also just get general-

>> BET: General UI improvement.

>> AMBER: -usability feedback, because when you’re working on a website everyday, you’re like, “I understand how it’s architected, and I understand how the navigation menu works, and I know where to go to find all the things,” but then if you get someone who’s never seen or been on a website before, they might give you some really beneficial feedback that could help you with your conversion rate, some of which is accessibility and some of which is just you’re naming your products wrong.

>> BET: Yes, or you’ve made this process not so intuitive, right?

>> AMBER: Yes.

>> BET: Awesome. Cool. Any other questions?

>> AMBER: I have not seen any more questions. Can you give a quick shout-out on where people can find you if they want to follow up?

>> BET: Awesome. Yes, accessicart.com is our website, and there’s a contact form there. You can email me at bet@accessicart.com, and I’m on LinkedIn. Those are the best places to find me. I pulled back on some of the other social media.

>> AMBER: It’s a lot to have to manage, so I totally understand. Thank you again so much, Bet.

>> BET: Thanks. Yes.

>> AMBER: It’s always a pleasure. I love how I learn something at every one of these meetups. I really appreciate you coming-

>> BET: For sure.

>> AMBER: -and sharing all the effort that you put into deep diving into how this law and regulations are being enforced.

>> BET: Yes. Awesome. Thanks for having me.

>> AMBER: Yes. Thanks, everyone. We’ll be back in two weeks on a Tuesday. Tune in then for training your support staff on accessibility.

>> [01:05:45] [END OF AUDIO]