If you run an online store in Ohio and ship to Berlin, an EU law you may have never read now describes your checkout flow. The European Accessibility Act (EAA) — formally Directive (EU) 2019/882 — applied from 28 June 2025, and its scope is written around who your customers are, not where your company is registered. For a lot of US sellers, that is a surprise. This piece explains, in plain language, when the EAA reaches across the Atlantic, what it actually asks for, and why the technical bar is one you may already be chasing for the ADA.

This is general information, not legal advice. The EAA is implemented through 27 national laws, and your exposure depends on specifics — talk to an EU-qualified attorney before making compliance decisions.

What the EAA is — and what it covers

The EAA is the EU’s attempt to set one accessibility bar across the single market instead of 27 different ones. It targets a defined list of products and services, not the whole internet. On the services side, the EUR-Lex summary lists ecommerce, consumer banking, e-books, certain transport services (websites, ticketing, journey information), telephony, access to audiovisual media services, and the 112 emergency line. On the products side it covers things like computers, smartphones, payment terminals, ATMs, ticketing machines and e-readers.

For most US digital businesses, the operative word is ecommerce. The Directive defines ecommerce services in Article 3(30) as services “provided at a distance, through websites and mobile device-based services by electronic means and at the individual request of a consumer with a view to concluding a consumer contract” (Accessible.org’s breakdown of the Article text). In plainer terms: if a consumer can buy something from you online, that transaction is an ecommerce service in the EAA’s eyes.

Why a US business can be in scope

Here is the part that catches people. The EAA does not carve out non-EU companies. It reaches “any natural or legal person who provides a service on the Union market or makes offers to provide such a service to consumers in the Union” — so, as the same Accessible.org analysis puts it bluntly, “a US-based retailer shipping to Germany must follow the same rules as a German company.”

What likely puts you in scope is not a warehouse in Rotterdam — it is intent to sell to EU consumers. Signals an enforcer would read as “offering to provide a service” to the Union market include pricing in euros, listing EU countries in your shipping options, translating into EU languages, or running a .de / .fr storefront. A purely domestic US store that happens to receive an order from a tourist is a very different situation from one actively marketing into the EU. That line is exactly the kind of fact-specific question worth running past counsel.

If you already track US litigation risk — the demand letters, the serial plaintiffs, the state-by-state ADA lawsuit patterns — the EAA is a second front with a different enforcement style (national market-surveillance authorities rather than private plaintiffs’ attorneys), but the same underlying ask: a website people with disabilities can actually use.

The benchmark: WCAG 2.1 AA, through EN 301 549

Good news for anyone who has done ADA work: the EAA does not invent a new web standard. Its functional accessibility requirements are met, for web content, through the harmonised European standard EN 301 549, which incorporates WCAG 2.1 Level AA (European Commission, Shaping Europe’s digital future). The current harmonised version, EN 301 549 v3.2.1, folds in WCAG 2.1 in full for web content.

So the practical instruction is the same one we give every US client: build to WCAG 2.1 AA. The same success criteria that keep you off the radar of US plaintiffs — keyboard operability, sufficient color contrast, labeled and accessible forms, proper headings and alt text — are the ones EN 301 549 is built on. One body of remediation work satisfies both regimes. Note one nuance: EN 301 549 also covers non-web software, documents and hardware, so it can ask for more than WCAG alone in those areas — but for a typical web storefront, WCAG 2.1 AA is the working target.

The microenterprise exemption is narrow

You may have heard the EAA “exempts small businesses.” Be careful with that. The exemption for services applies only to microenterprises — defined as fewer than 10 employees and an annual turnover (or balance-sheet total) not exceeding EUR 2 million (EUR-Lex summary). That is a genuinely tiny threshold; most companies with a real ecommerce operation clear it. And critically, that carve-out is for services — it does not exempt microenterprises from the EAA’s product accessibility rules. Whether you qualify is a counting exercise best confirmed with an attorney, not assumed.

What to actually do about it

If you sell into the EU and you’re above the microenterprise line, treat the EAA the way you’d treat any WCAG-anchored obligation — and skip the shortcut. An accessibility overlay widget won’t satisfy the EAA any more than it satisfies the ADA; it sits on top of a broken page instead of fixing the underlying HTML. The durable path is the boring one:

  1. Audit your storefront and checkout against WCAG 2.1 AA — a real accessibility audit, not just an automated scan, since automated tools catch a minority of issues.
  2. Remediate the actual code through manual accessibility remediation, prioritising the buy-flow consumers depend on.
  3. Document what you did. The EAA contemplates accessibility statements and conformity records; a paper trail also helps if a US demand letter ever lands.

Curbcut is built for exactly this: small businesses that need their site to genuinely work for disabled users — across both the ADA and the EAA — through hand-done remediation rather than a bolt-on widget. If you sell to EU consumers and you’re not sure where you stand, start with a free scan to see how far your site is from WCAG 2.1 AA.