The European Accessibility Act has been in force since 28 June 2025. If you are reading an article that describes it as an upcoming deadline, that article is out of date, and a surprising number of them are.
There is a second date — 28 June 2030 — by which existing content must also comply. That is the one still ahead of you.
What the Act requires
The EAA sets accessibility requirements for certain products and services sold in the European Union. For a website, that means it has to be perceivable, operable, understandable and robust, which in practice means conforming to WCAG 2.1 Level AA or better. Most organisations target WCAG 2.2 AA now, since it is a superset and the newer criteria are not onerous.
It is not a WordPress rule, a plugin rule or a badge. It is a requirement about whether people can actually use your site.
Who it covers
The Act applies to businesses offering certain services to consumers in the EU, including e-commerce, banking, transport, e-books and electronic communications.
Two things catch people out.
It is not limited to EU companies. If you sell to consumers in the EU, it can apply to you regardless of where you are based.
Microenterprises providing services are exempt. That is generally fewer than 10 staff and under €2 million annual turnover. The exemption applies to services, not products, and the definitions matter, so check rather than assume.
If your position is genuinely unclear, that is a question for a lawyer who knows your jurisdiction. It is not something a plugin can answer, and anybody telling you otherwise is selling something.
What has actually changed since June 2025
Enforcement is handled by individual member states, and it has been ramping up rather than arriving all at once. Through 2026 the pattern has been monitoring authorities escalating audits and complaint handling.
The practical risk for most site owners is not a surprise raid. It is a complaint from a user who could not complete a purchase, followed by a requirement to fix it on somebody else’s timetable rather than your own.
What to do if you are behind
Nobody goes from nothing to conformance in an afternoon. A sensible order:
1. Find out where you stand. Run an audit against your real pages. Automated checks will settle part of it quickly.
2. Fix the repeated faults first. On most WordPress sites the bulk of findings are a handful of theme mistakes repeated across every page. One change to a template clears hundreds of findings.
3. Describe your images. Missing alt text is usually the single largest category on a site that has never been checked.
4. Do the manual testing. Keyboard first, then a screen reader. Automated tools cannot tell you whether your checkout can be completed without a mouse.
5. Publish an accessibility statement. Include the feedback mechanism the rules expect: a way for somebody who hits a barrier to tell you, and get a reply.
That last step matters more than it looks. A statement that names known problems and gives a date is evidence of a plan. Silence is not.
What a plugin can and cannot do for you
It can find the mechanical failures fast, fix many of them properly, and keep a record of what was done and when.
It cannot determine or certify that you comply with the EAA. Conformance is a property of your site and your organisation’s practices. Be careful with any product that claims to confer it — accessibility overlays make exactly that claim, and it is the claim that has drawn regulatory attention.
WOWStudio Accessibility Remediation is explicit about this. It will never report your site as compliant, and the statement it generates is a draft you review and attest to yourself, because a conformance claim with nobody’s name on it is worth nothing.
Questions people ask
Is the deadline 2025 or 2030?
Both. Services and products placed on the market from 28 June 2025 had to comply then. Existing content has until 28 June 2030.
Does the EAA apply to a small WordPress blog?
Generally not. It targets specific consumer services, and microenterprises providing services are exempt. A small e-commerce business selling into the EU is a different matter.
Which WCAG version do I need?
WCAG 2.1 Level AA is the practical baseline. Targeting 2.2 AA is better and not much more work.
Is this legal advice?
No. This is a description of how the rules are generally understood, written by people who build websites. For your own exposure, ask a lawyer.
To see where your site actually stands, the plugin is free on WordPress.org. Start with your first scan.