Yet another reason to invest in accessibility, but this time, it can impact the bottom line
As of June 28, 2025, if you sell stuff in the EU, not complying with the European Accessibility Act (EAA) can get you fined.
We’ll get to the EAA in a sec. but let’s first acknowledge something: Selling the value of accessibility is not easy.
Why work on better accessibility when you could be working on that thing that’ll get your PM brownie points instead?
As with most things, in order to win that battle, you have to tie the conversation to the business.
And that’s where the EAA might ease things for you.
Before we go further, keep in mind I’m not a legal advisor of any kind. I’m writing this for informational purposes and you should do your own research. I’ll link to the official documentation below.
What the heck is the EAA? — I hear you ask
It’s basically the EU’s way of asking its members to make accessibility standards the law.
It aims to standardize accessibility compliance across the union. And what it means to you is, if you sell products to people in the EU, you have to comply with those standards, or else.
Why should you care about the EAA?
As a designer, digital accessibility is largely your responsibility. I don’t need to tell you that good accessibility is good UX. We should be beyond that at this point.
Instead, let me give you some business reasons to help you get your PMs and execs on board for once.
Business reason #1: If you don’t comply, you might get a fine (or several)
It’s hard to get any more clear than that: if you don’t adhere to accessibility standards in the EU, you can get fined.
And you could get fined by multiple countries at the same time. The EAA unifies accessibility standards across its members but lets each member decide whether and how to punish offenders.
Some might ignore it, others might send an angry letter, and others might give you a fine. And since each one decides individually, you could end up racking up fines from several of them.
Your company might say, “well, surely we can just pay the fine and that’d be cheaper than complying” — to which I say, don’t be so sure.
As of the time of writing, there isn’t much info on the fines for EAA offenders but, we can just look at the fines for GDPR non-compliance:
There are two tiers of penalties, with a maximum of 20m euros (£17.29m) or 4% of global revenue.— BBC
You can spend a few hours a week improving your app’s accessibility. That’ll get you in good shape in less than a quarter for a relatively low investment. But if you don’t the fines might end up costing you far more than the yearly salaries of your entire department.
Business reason #2: Accessibility widens your addressable market
You might think accessibility is for people on a wheelchair who can’t see. That’s a reductionist and useless misconception.
There’s lots of types of disabilities and they affect people from all ethnicities and countries. Yes, even white cisgender males.
- 7% of children worldwide suffer from some degree of dyslexia. It’s a bit more common in boys. Source.
- About 8% of European caucasian males suffer from inherited red-green color deficiency. Source.
- As many as 18% of office workers develop tendinitis. Source.
All populations are affected to different degrees by different types of disabilities. But we have accessibility standards to help everyone better read, understand, control and enjoy the apps we design.
For a lot of people, who could and may want to pay for your app, accessibility is the key factor determining whether they can use your app at all.
Business reason #3: Yes, accessibility makes your app better
“Web Accessibility: Essential for some, useful for all” — W3C
Accessibility is good design. And good design is good for the bottom line. Design has a proven ROI. You bosses know it or they wouldn’t pay your salary.
Most people won’t realize that a lot of accessibility features make for great experiences for everyone. Even if you don’t —yet— have a disability, accessibility makes life much easier.
Here are some every day examples:
- Text navigation and voice commands are great if you break your arm, as I learned in the summer 2021.
- Speech-to-text comes in handy when you’re on the go and want to interact with ChatGPT, or god forbid, Siri. Heck, it is even my go-to way to search for content on my TV.
- Text-to-speech is fantastic if you want your computer to read you an article while you do stuff around the house.
- Dark mode is easy on your eyes if you need to use your devices at night.
- Have you ever been annoyed at someone watching TikTok in public transport without headphones on? With video captions, you don’t need to turn on your audio to watch a talking-head video.
- Have you ever been to a new supermarket that organizes things differently than you’re used to? It’s frustrating, right? Good information architecture and categorization help with that annoyance.
These “quality of life” features are great for every day use cases which increase the perceived value of your app and, to be honest, most of these are expected.
Where to start?
First of all, I hope this article arms you with business arguments when bringing the accessibility conversation to your company. Getting them on board is step one.
Step number two is to figure out where you app stands in terms of accessibility to understand how much work needs to be done.
Which standards to use?
While the EAA doesn’t specify a standard, the European Commission itself uses the EN 301 549 V3.2.1 which in turn is supposed to be closely based on the widely adopted Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 Level AA.
So basically, if you follow the WCAG 2 level AA, which is very well documented, you should be fine.
Closing words
Any action you can take to improve the accessibility of the products you work on is a step in the right direction.
And look, lots of people have been advocating about accessibility for a really long time now. There’s a lot of material to learn from in any form you prefer: podcasts, long and short-form video, articles, blogs, and books.
My suggestion is to educate yourself about accessibility standards as much as possible so you learn to identify and apply them. It’s really not that difficult and won’t take more than a few hours. I’ll link some resources at the bottom.
“Accessible technology and standards have existed for over two decades. It takes 4 hours to learn enough to start developing things in an accessible manner. In a week, you would probably be competent in several areas. It generally does not take long before developers start asking, “why were we doing it that way before?”” — Giving a Damn About Accessibility — Sheri Byrne-Haber, 2021
Key links
Learn more about accessibility
- Giving a Damn About Accessibility by Sheri Byrne-Haber and the UX Collective. An inspiring piece with lots of practical advice on the value of designing accessible experiences. It’s available in audio and PDF.
- Web Accessibility Perspectives. A video produced by the W3C itself, will give you some powerful aha! moments on some key accessibility points.
- Ready or not, the EAA is here. Allie Paschal wrote a great piece explaining the EAA more in detail and outlining some key accessibility principles.
- Accessibility articles published in the UX Collective.
Sources
- Deloitte’s market impact analysis
- Meta-analysis on the prevalence of dyslexia in children—Yang L, Li C, Li X, Zhai M, An Q, Zhang Y, Zhao J, Weng X. Brain Sciences. 2022; 12(2):240. https://doi.org/10.3390/brainsci12020240
- Worldwide prevalence of red-green color deficiency — Jennifer Birch. J. Opt. Soc. Am. A 29, 313–320 (2012).
- Wrist tendinitis and office workers—Hatem, N., Mahmoud,R., Elmounedi, N., & Mahmoud, A. 2025.
- Three years of GDPR: the biggest fines so far — BBC, May 24, 2021
How to sell the European Accessibility Act to your boss was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
