Guide
The European Accessibility Act and your WordPress site
The European Accessibility Act has applied since 28 June 2025. If your WordPress site sells products or services to consumers in the EU — an online store, booking, banking or e-book service — it probably applies to you. This guide explains what it asks for in practical terms. It is general information, not legal advice.
Updated September 25, 2026. General information, not legal advice.
What the EAA is
The European Accessibility Act (Directive (EU) 2019/882) sets common accessibility requirements for a list of products and services sold in the EU. Each member state has turned it into national law, with its own enforcement body and penalties.
For websites, the practical benchmark is the harmonized standard EN 301 549, which is built on WCAG. The version currently cited, V3.2.1, is based on WCAG 2.1 Level AA; a new version aligned with WCAG 2.2 was published in September 2026. Meeting WCAG 2.2 AA puts you in a good position for both.
Who it covers
The services covered include e-commerce, consumer banking, electronic communications, audiovisual media services, passenger transport services and e-books. For most WordPress site owners the key one is e-commerce: selling products or services to consumers online.
Microenterprises that provide services — fewer than 10 employees and an annual turnover or balance sheet total of no more than €2 million — are exempt from the service requirements. The exemption does not apply to products. Businesses outside the EU are covered when they sell to consumers in the EU.
Practical steps for a WordPress site
- Choose an accessibility-ready theme and check its header, menus, footer and forms with a keyboard.
- Scan all existing content and fix the common problems: missing alt text, skipped headings, vague links, unlabeled form fields and low-contrast text.
- Test the journeys customers complete: product pages, cart, checkout, account and contact forms.
- Check documents such as PDFs, which are part of the service too.
- Publish an accessibility statement that explains how your service meets the requirements, its known limitations and how to report a problem.
- Keep new content accessible by checking it before it is published, and re-test after theme or plugin updates.
Where Lumtera helps
Lumtera's free plugin checks every post, page and WooCommerce product against 64 WCAG 2.2 checks, shows authors how to fix each issue in WordPress, and checks the rendered page — theme, menus and footer — in Review mode. Its accessibility statement generator covers the parts an EAA statement is expected to include: a feedback mechanism, the enforcement procedure, any disproportionate burden and review dates, with known limitations pre-filled from your findings.
Lumtera Pro adds checks of key pages and templates — including cart and checkout — on a schedule, PDF checks, monitoring and reports that document your progress.
No tool can make a site conform on its own. Use automated checks to fix what can be found reliably, then test the rest by hand or with an accessibility specialist.
Questions
Does the EAA apply to my blog or brochure site?
The EAA covers specific consumer products and services, not every website. A site that only publishes information may fall outside it — but other laws, and your visitors, still benefit from an accessible site. Check the national law that applies to you.
What are the penalties?
Each EU country sets its own penalties, which the directive requires to be effective, proportionate and dissuasive. They differ between countries, so check the national law where you sell.
Is an accessibility overlay enough for the EAA?
No tool can make a site conform on its own, and overlays do not change the underlying content. The requirements are met by fixing the site itself.
Sources
Find these issues on your own site
Lumtera checks every post, page and product against 64 WCAG 2.2 checks while you write, checks the rendered page in Review mode, and scans the whole site in one click. Free, with no account.
Lumtera features that help
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Free
Accessibility statement generator
Create an accessibility statement in the structure the W3C recommends, with the sections the European Accessibility Act expects and known limitations pre-filled from your own findings.
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Free
Whole-page review
Check a page the way visitors see it — theme, header, menus, footer and page-builder output — with real color contrast, target size and keyboard focus checks, from Review mode.
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Pro
PDF accessibility checks
Check the PDFs in your Media Library for tags, title, language, scanned pages, bookmarks and restrictive encryption.
Start with the free plugin today
All 64 checks, the editor sidebar, Elementor panel and site report — free, with no account and no page limits.