One Year After the European Accessibility Act, Most Businesses Are Still Catching Up

Eight years ago, GDPR became enforceable across the EU. The first two years were quiet enough that plenty of organizations took the silence as a sign the urgency had been overstated. Then came Google's €50 million fine in 2019(opens in a new tab) and Meta's record-breaking €1.2 billion fine in 2023(opens in a new tab). The organizations that had waited were suddenly doing the work twice: the retrofit, the fine, and then the long process of earning back customer trust.

The European Accessibility Act(opens in a new tab) (EAA) is at that same point on the curve right now. And new data from AudioEye's 2026 Digital Accessibility Index(opens in a new tab) shows just how much ground remains to close.

One year in, the accessibility gap between EU and US sites is still wide

AudioEye scanned more than 166,000 web pages across seven industries for its 2026 Digital Accessibility Index, including sites in both the US and EU. One year after the EAA took effect, EU sites average 25% more accessibility issues per page than their US counterparts. That gap showed up across nearly every industry measured: EU professional services sites carry 44% more issues per page than comparable US sites. Public and non-profit organizations run 42% higher. Industrial and manufacturing sites are 41% behind.

The one exception is tech. EU tech companies are essentially on par with US tech companies, not because they prioritized accessibility for its own sake, but because their enterprise buyers required it. Procurement standards and B2B sales cycles pushed accessibility up the priority stack, and the gap closed. Every other industry is still waiting for that same pressure to arrive.

It's worth noting that the same five Web Content Accessibility Guidelines(opens in a new tab) (WCAG) failures account for 40% of all detected issues globally: missing image alt text, inaccessible link labels, unlabeled buttons and form fields, insufficient color contrast, and missing keyboard skip navigation. These aren't obscure technical edge cases. They're the issues that prevent users from completing basic tasks, and they're the same ones that appear most often in litigation.

Enforcement is already underway, across multiple countries and mechanisms

The EAA didn't produce a headline fine in year one. What it produced instead was something more instructive: enforcement starting in pieces, across different countries, through different mechanisms, on different timelines. That's exactly how GDPR started too.

Within days of the June 28, 2025 deadline, French disability organizations issued formal legal notices(opens in a new tab) to four major retailers demanding their e-commerce platforms meet accessibility standards. When those responses proved inadequate, emergency injunctions followed in French court. Those cases are still pending, but the precedent they set is significant: in France, civil society actors with legal standing are driving enforcement, on a timeline that doesn't run through a government agency.

In Norway, a healthcare portal faced daily fines of NOK 50,000(opens in a new tab) after an inspection found 119 accessibility errors. In Germany, e-commerce operators began receiving warning letters citing accessibility violations(opens in a new tab) within weeks of the EAA taking effect. In the Netherlands(opens in a new tab), companies that failed to proactively report their accessibility compliance status to regulators by October 2025 are now flagged for follow-up audits.

None of these are the Meta fine. But neither was Google's €50 million, at the time.

What the GDPR playbook tells us about what comes next

GDPR taught a lesson that goes beyond the fines. The cost of unpreparedness didn't start when enforcement arrived. It started the moment the gap existed, because users were already experiencing the consequences. The fine was the visible cost. The erosion of trust was the real one.

The same dynamic applies to accessibility. According to the Click-Away Pound report(opens in a new tab), 71% of users with disabilities leave sites they find difficult to use, highlighting that oftentimes, the damage doesn't show up as a complaint. It shows up as a conversion that never happened, a customer who doesn't come back, a referral that never gets made.

The organizations that moved early on GDPR avoided the fine, and something more valuable came with it: an audience their competitors couldn't buy back, and trust that took years to build. That's the choice sitting in front of every business right now: wait for the fines to come, or get ahead of them and build that same advantage. The EAA is one year in. The GDPR timeline took about five years to go from quiet enforcement to billion-euro fines. History says the businesses that act now will spend the next few years building trust, instead of scrambling to rebuild it once it's gone.