Web Accessibility Is Now the Law in Europe — and Good Business

Since 28 June 2025, the European Accessibility Act (EAA) applies across the EU, including Portugal. If you sell online or provide consumer services digitally, accessibility stopped being a nice-to-have and became a legal requirement — with real enforcement mechanisms behind it.

Most small-business owners we talk to assume this only applies to banks and airlines. It does not. E-commerce is explicitly in scope. If your site has a checkout, a booking form, or takes payments, you should be paying attention.

This article covers what the law requires in plain terms, who is exempt, why accessibility pays for itself even without the legal pressure, and a 10-point audit anyone can run in 30 minutes.

What the European Accessibility Act covers

The EAA is an EU directive, transposed into national law in each member state (in Portugal, through Decreto-Lei n.º 82/2022). Since June 2025 it applies to new products and services offered to consumers, including:

• E-commerce — any website or app where consumers buy products or services
• Banking and financial services for consumers
• Electronic communications (phone, messaging services)
• Transport booking — tickets, check-in, timetables
• E-books and e-readers
• Audiovisual media services and their apps

The practical takeaway: if your website sells something to consumers — physical products, courses, bookings, subscriptions — the e-commerce provisions likely apply to you.

One honest caveat: transposition details, transition periods, and enforcement practice vary by country and continue to evolve. Verify the current rules for your specific situation with a legal adviser or your national market surveillance authority before making compliance decisions. Nothing here is legal advice.

Who is exempt

Two main carve-outs matter for small businesses:

Exemption	What it means
Micro-enterprises providing services	Fewer than 10 employees AND annual turnover or balance sheet under €2 million — exempt from the service requirements, including e-commerce
Disproportionate burden	Larger businesses can claim compliance would impose a disproportionate burden, but must document and justify it — and the exemption can be challenged

So yes: a two-person shop selling online in Portugal is probably exempt from the EAA's e-commerce obligations. Two reasons not to relax:

1. Exemptions are about penalties, not customers. An inaccessible checkout loses sales whether or not a regulator can fine you.
2. You may outgrow the exemption, or sell to businesses that require accessible suppliers. Public-sector clients in Portugal already must meet accessibility rules under earlier legislation.

What accessibility requires in practice

The technical benchmark behind the EAA is effectively WCAG 2.1 level AA (via the EN 301 549 standard). Stripped of jargon, the core requirements are:

• Contrast. Text must stand out from its background — a minimum contrast ratio of 4.5:1 for normal text. Light grey text on white fails.
• Keyboard access. Everything a mouse can do, a keyboard must do too: menus, forms, checkout, popups. Many users cannot use a mouse at all.
• Labels. Every form field needs a visible label. Placeholder text that disappears when you type does not count.
• Text alternatives. Images that carry meaning need alt text. Buttons that are just icons need accessible names.
• Captions. Pre-recorded video needs captions; audio content needs transcripts.
• Structure. Proper headings, logical reading order, and links that make sense out of context ("View pricing", not "click here").
• No traps. Nothing that flashes rapidly, no time limits without warnings, no content that only works on hover.

None of this requires exotic technology. It requires care during design and development — which is exactly why retrofitting is expensive and building it in from day one is cheap.

The business case, without the compliance stick

Even if you are exempt, the numbers favour accessibility:

• Aging customers. Over 24% of Portugal's population is 65 or older, and the share keeps rising. Age brings reduced vision, dexterity, and hearing — the exact things accessibility addresses. This is your fastest-growing customer segment.
• Around 1 in 4 EU adults reports some form of disability or long-standing activity limitation. That is purchasing power you silently turn away with an inaccessible checkout.
• SEO overlap. Alt text, heading structure, descriptive links, fast readable pages — Google rewards the same things screen readers need. Accessibility work is SEO work you were going to pay for anyway.
• Mobile usability. Bigger touch targets, better contrast in sunlight, captions for videos watched on mute — accessibility improvements help every phone user, which is most of your traffic.

There is no credible business argument for shipping an inaccessible site in 2026. The only real question is whether you fix it deliberately or lose sales quietly.

The 10-point self-audit (30 minutes, no tools required)

Run this on your own site today:

1. Unplug your mouse. Tab through the whole site. Can you reach every menu item, open every form, and complete a purchase using only the keyboard? Can you always see which element is focused?
2. Squint test. Step back and squint at each page. Can you still distinguish text from background and buttons from decoration?
3. Zoom to 200% in your browser. Does the layout still work, or does content overlap and disappear?
4. Check form labels. Click each field's label text — the cursor should jump into the field. If nothing happens, the label is not connected.
5. Mute a video on your site. Can you still follow it? If not, it needs captions.
6. Read your links aloud out of context. "Learn more, learn more, click here" tells a screen-reader user nothing.
7. Check image alt text. Right-click → inspect any meaningful image. Is there an alt attribute that describes it?
8. Trigger an error in a form (submit it empty). Is the error explained in text near the field, or only signalled with a red border?
9. Test on your phone in sunlight. Genuinely — low contrast fails outdoors first.
10. Run a free automated scan (Lighthouse in Chrome, or WAVE). Automated tools catch roughly 30–40% of issues, but they catch them fast.

If you fail three or more of these, your checkout is losing customers right now.

What honestly needs a professional

Self-audits find the obvious problems. They do not fix them, and they miss entire categories:

• Screen-reader testing — automated tools cannot judge whether a page actually makes sense when read aloud
• Complex components — custom dropdowns, date pickers, modal dialogs, and multi-step checkouts need proper ARIA implementation, which is easy to get dangerously wrong
• PDF and document accessibility
• An accessibility statement and conformance documentation, if you are in scope of the law

Fixing an existing site ranges from a few days of focused work to a rebuild, depending on how it was built. Building accessibility into a new site from the start costs close to nothing extra — it is mostly discipline, not budget. That is how we build every project at Feitura: sites and stores accessible by default, and — because we pair senior engineering with AI — delivered in a fraction of the months a traditional agency takes — and charges €3,000–6,000 — for an institutional site.

If you want to know what an accessible site or store would cost for your specific business, get a free estimate — it takes two minutes and you will have numbers, not adjectives.