EU Accessibility Act: digital platforms still fall short

Almost a year after the European Accessibility Act began to apply across the EU, new research suggests most websites and digital services are still not usable for people who are blind or vision impaired. The law made digital accessibility a legal duty for a wide range of products and services from 28 June 2025, yet adoption appears far behind the rule. For brands running hundreds of location pages, store locators, and booking flows, accessibility is now both a compliance obligation and a question of who can reach you.

What happened

The European Accessibility Act (Directive (EU) 2019/882) requires a broad set of consumer products and services, including e-commerce, banking, transport ticketing, and the websites and apps that deliver them, to meet common accessibility standards. Member states had to apply the rules from 28 June 2025, according to the European Commission.

Nearly a year on, research from Vision Ireland, Ireland’s national sight-loss agency, indicates the law has not yet changed the everyday experience of disabled users. As reported by Irish Tech News, only 3% of blind and vision-impaired respondents said they had noticed an improvement in website and digital-service accessibility since the rules took effect, while a much larger share reported no change at all. The same research found just 56 formal complaints across Ireland’s six designated regulators in the first year, 52 of them to the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission, which points to limited enforcement and awareness rather than widespread compliance.

Why it matters

“The European Accessibility Act was meant to remove barriers, but for many people, those barriers are still there every time they go online.”

Chris White, CEO of Vision Ireland

The gap between the legal standard and the live experience is the risk. Enforcement is administered nationally and is still ramping up, but the direction is one way: accessibility moves from optional good practice to an auditable duty. For consumer-facing brands, an inaccessible store locator or booking step is no longer only lost revenue, it is potential legal exposure across every market where the rules apply.

What this means for multi-location brands

At enterprise scale, accessibility is a data and template problem, not a page-by-page fix. A national retailer, a bank, or a transport operator may run thousands of location pages generated from the same templates and the same underlying location data, so an accessibility defect in one template repeats everywhere, and so does a fix. The work is to audit the components customers actually use to find and reach a location: the store locator, individual location pages, opening hours, and contact and booking actions, then remediate at the template and data layer so every location inherits a compliant experience.

Accurate, structured location data underpins this. Consistent, machine-readable information about each location is easier for assistive technology to parse and easier to keep correct across markets, which is exactly what the law is asking for.

The bottom line

The EU Accessibility Act is in force, but compliance on the ground is lagging. Brands that manage location data and templates centrally can close that gap once and have it apply everywhere, which is both the cheaper path and the safer one.