Posted on by Léonie Watson in Standards
Tags: WCAG
The European Accessibility Act (EAA) requires that products and services made available within the European Union (EU) are accessible. Like most EU Directives, the EAA (DIRECTIVE (EU) 2019/882) is hard to understand, and this has left many people unsure about what it means - and more importantly, what they need to do to make sure their products and services comply.
With this in mind, we'd like to share our understanding of the EAA as it applies to digital products and services.
Based on our understanding of the EAA as it relates to digital products and services, the steps that economic operators and service providers need to take to maximise their conformance with the act:
Article 1 (Subject Matter) explains that the purpose of the EAA is to simplify the task of making certain products and services available within the EU, by offering a single set of accessibility requirements.
Article 2 (Scope) of the EAA describes the different products and services covered by the act:
The EAA applies to certain types of electronic and digital products, including:
The EAA also applies to certain types of digital service, including:
Certain parts of digital services are exempt from the EAA, including:
The EAA sets general accessibility requirements for all products and services that are in scope, as well as more specific accessibility requirements for certain products and services.
Article 4 (Accessibility Requirements) says that all products and services must comply with the accessibility requirements in Annex I, specifically:
We'll come to Annex I later in this post, but first we'll cover two more articles that set out requirements for products and services.
Articles 7 to 12 of the EAA set out obligations and other expectations for product manufacturers, distributors, and importers, but Article 13 sets out the obligations for service providers.
The first obligation is that service providers must "design and provide services" that comply with the requirements in the EAA.
Service providers are also obliged to prepare information in oral and written format that meets the requirements set out in Annex V and must maintain that information for as long as the service is available.
In addition, service providers are obliged to put in place processes for maintaining compliance with the EAA. Those processes must take into account changes to services and the way they're provided, as well as updates to the harmonised standards referenced in the EAA.
If a service does not comply with the requirements set out in the EAA, the service provider is obliged to take action to make sure that it does. In addition, the service provider must report itself and the service to the relevant national authorities of every EU member state in which the service is provided, and the report must include details of where the service does not comply, and the corrective actions being taken.
When asked by a "competent national authority", service providers are obliged to supply all information needed to demonstrate that a service complies with the accessibility requirements of the EAA. The service provider must also cooperate with any requests to bring the service into conformance with the EAA, made by that national authority.
The EAA itself doesn't directly state what the general accessibility requirements are. It instead presumes that if a product or service conforms to "harmonised standards" published in the Official Journal of the European Union, they conform to the EAA.
In 2022, the European Commission (EC) formally requested the provision of harmonised standards to support the EAA; specifically updates to:
Those updates have not yet been published, so for now the current version of these standards should be used.
EN 301 549, (PDF) is a set of accessibility requirements for Information Communication Technologies (ICT), including both hardware and software.
Version 3.2.1 of EN 301 549 was published in 2021, bringing it in line with the EU Web Accessibility Directive (that was implemented into UK law as the Public Sector Accessibility Regulations).
Note: EN 301 549 3.2.1 incorporates the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1, and version 4.1.1 (expected in 2026) will incorporate WCAG 2.2.
EN 17161 is a set of guidelines to help organisations take an inclusive approach to designing and building products and services.
Published in 2019, EN 17161 enables organisations to adopt sustainable accessibility practices by considering the needs of a diverse range of people with different types of disability during product and service planning. It involves including those people, either directly or indirectly, as products and services are designed and built, while incorporating accessibility into process and practices.
Annex I Section I says:
Products must be designed and produced in such a way as to maximise their foreseeable use by persons with disabilities and shall be accompanied where possible in or on the product by accessible information.
Section I.1 sets out these requirements for information about using a product, when the information is made available on the product itself:
Section I.1 then goes on to extend those requirements for information that's made available when using the product, or elsewhere (like a website):
Section I.2 then says:
The product, including its user interface, shall contain features, elements and functions, that allow persons with disabilities to access, perceive, operate, understand and control the product [...]
The requirements for this can be summarised as saying the product:
The rest of Section I.2 sets out "sector specific" requirements.
Self-service terminals must:
eBook readers must:
Terminals used for consumer communication services must:
Section II explains that the requirements in Section I.1 also apply to the instructions for the installation and maintenance, storage and disposal of the product, whether provided on the product or elsewhere (like a website).
Section III sets out accessibility requirements for services:
Annex I Section IV begins with:
The provision of services in order to maximise their foreseeable use by persons with disabilities, shall be achieved by including functions, practices, policies and procedures and alterations in the operation of the service targeted to address the needs of persons with disabilities and ensure interoperability with assistive technologies
Section IV then sets out the additional requirements for the following types of service.
Electronic communications services including emergency services, must:
TV and video services, must:
National and international sea, air, bus, rail, and water transport services, must:
Urban, suburban, and regional transport services must make sure that self-service terminals (for purchasing tickets etc.) comply with the requirements in Annex I Section I.
Consumer banking services, must:
eBooks, must:
Annex I Section V sets out requirements relating to the answering of calls and communications with the single European emergency number (112), which does not touch on the provision of digital services.
Annex I Section VI sets out a presumption of conformity with other EU standards, if the requirements in Annex I Section I and Section II are met. Note that "other EU standards" does not mean the harmonised standards mentioned in the EAA.
Annex I Section VII begins with:
In order to maximise the foreseeable use by persons with disabilities, when the accessibility requirements, set out in Sections I to VI of this Annex, do not address one or more functions of the design and production of products or the provision of services those functions or means shall be accessible by complying with the related functional performance criteria.
It goes on to clarify that the functional performance criteria can only be used as an alternative to the accessibility requirements set out in Sections I to VI, if:
These functional performance criteria can be summarised as:
Section VII goes on to include this functional performance criteria:
Where the product or service incorporates features that are provided for accessibility, it shall provide at least one mode of operation that maintains privacy when using those features that are provided for accessibility.
Annex V describes the information that must be provided for a service to comply with the EAA:
Annex V also reiterates that conformance with the harmonised standards (EN 301 549 and EN 17161) can be used to presume conformity with the requirements of the EAA.
Where the Web Accessibility Directive (WAD) referred to "monitoring", the EAA uses the term "market surveillance" to describe the way EU member states oversee conformance of products and services. In another difference from the WAD, an EU member state may have more than one national market surveillance authority that is responsible for carrying out the market surveillance.
Like the WAD, the EAA describes circumstances in which compliance with the EAA represents a "disproportionate burden".
Article 14 of the EAA says that the accessibility requirements in Article IV do not apply if a product or service requires a "fundamental alteration of its basic nature" in order to comply and results in the "imposition of a disproportionate burden".
To determine if either of these conditions is true, the "economic operator" (the EAA term for a product manufacturer, distributor, or importer, or service provider) must carry out an assessment using criteria that are set out in Annex VI. The result of the assessment must be documented and kept for five years from the date a product was last made available, or a service was last provided. Disproportionate burden assessments for services must be repeated whenever a service is altered, or at least every five years.
If a disproportionate burden is claimed, the results of the disproportionate burden assessment must be submitted to the national authorities in every EU member state where the product or service is made available.
The criteria set out in Annex VI can be summarised as:
Economic operators and service providers are expected to assess their products and services for compliance with the EAA, and to declare the results.
Article 16 of the EAA requires that economic operators prepare a declaration of conformity for their products, and that it must state that the accessibility requirements have been met and demonstrated. If an exception under Article 14 (Fundamental alteration and disproportionate burden) is claimed, the declaration of conformity must document which accessibility requirements are exempt.
The declaration of conformity must include the elements described in Annex IV of the EAA, must be provided in the language of each EU member state where the product is available, and must be continuously maintained.
Article 16 covers declarations of conformity for products, but not services, and the EAA doesn't directly set out requirements for declaring service conformity. However, when the EC formally requested updates to the harmonised standards, it included a request for "establishing a model accessibility statement in accordance with Directive (EU) 2016/2102". In other words, for a model accessibility statement template based on the one required by the Web Accessibility Directive (WAD).
For more information about the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, read our WCAG primer, or find out more about how our assessments can help you identify issues in your websites, mobile applications, design systems, and other products and services.
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