The European Accessibility Act Is Live — and 94.8% of Homepages Still Fail

The European Accessibility Act came into force in June 2025. If you sell digital products or services to consumers in the EU, your website is expected to meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA, as embedded in the European standard EN 301 549. That obligation is a year old now.

Meanwhile, according to WebAIM's annual survey of the top one million homepages, 94.8% of them still fail automated accessibility checks, averaging around fifty detectable errors per page. The gap between what the law expects and what the web actually does remains enormous.

The failures are boring, which is good news

The most common problems are not exotic. Low-contrast text appears on roughly four in five failing homepages. Over half are missing alternative text on images. After that it is empty links, missing form labels, and pages that never declare their language.

None of that requires a rebuild. It requires somebody to check the contrast ratio on the grey-on-white body text a designer chose because it looked refined, and to accept that it fails. Most sites can move a long way with a few days of unglamorous work.

The legal picture is tightening, unevenly

In the United States, ADA-related digital lawsuits exceeded 4,600 in 2025, up roughly 14% year over year. On 20 April 2026 the Department of Justice issued an interim final rule extending certain compliance deadlines by a year — which is worth understanding precisely: the deadline moved, the obligation did not. The ADA's nondiscrimination requirements remain in force throughout, and private plaintiffs have continued filing suits during the extension.

In Europe, national implementation of the EAA has been inconsistent enough that the Commission has opened infringement proceedings against several member states. The direction of travel is not ambiguous, even where the enforcement timeline is.

The business case, without the moralising

The ethical argument for accessibility is real and has been made well by people better placed than us. The commercial argument is also real, and tends to land harder in a budget meeting:

• Around 16% of the global population lives with a disability — before you count temporary injuries, ageing users, bright sunlight, or a cracked phone screen.
• Forrester's research associates accessible products with roughly 23% higher long-term retention.
• Baymard's checkout research suggests accessible checkout flows can lift completion by up to 17%.
• Nearly nine in ten digital experience professionals now describe accessibility as a competitive advantage rather than a compliance cost.

Accessibility and AI search are the same project

Here is the part most businesses miss. Every practice that makes a page accessible — a logical heading hierarchy, meaningful link text, alt text, captions, semantic HTML, declared page language — is also precisely what makes a page legible to an AI system trying to extract and cite it.

You are not choosing between an accessibility budget and an AI-search budget. It is one piece of work with two payoffs, which makes it one of the few genuinely easy calls available right now.

Where to start on Monday

• Run an automated scan. It will catch contrast, alt text and labels — roughly the majority of your issues.
• Fix contrast first. It is the most common failure and usually the cheapest to correct.
• Try navigating your own site with the keyboard alone. No mouse. The experience is usually clarifying.
• Make alt text a required field in your CMS, so the problem stops regenerating.
• Then get a human test. Automated tools catch perhaps a third of real barriers.