Digital Accessibility Laws: How WCAG Mandates and the EU Accessibility Act Are Reshaping the Web

The Regulatory Turning Point

Digital accessibility has crossed a threshold from voluntary best practice to legal obligation in major markets worldwide. The European Accessibility Act (EAA), which took effect on June 28, 2025, requires all digital products and services sold in EU member states to meet accessibility standards. This encompasses e-commerce websites, banking services, e-books, ticketing machines, communication services, and operating systems. The scope is sweeping: any company selling digital products or services to European consumers must ensure those offerings are accessible to people with disabilities, or face penalties that can reach up to 100,000 EUR or 4% of annual revenue, depending on the member state.

In the United States, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) has been interpreted by courts to cover websites and mobile applications, even though the 1990 law never mentions the internet. More than 4,600 web accessibility lawsuits were filed across US federal and state courts in 2023, and that number surged past 5,100 in 2025 — a 20% increase over 2024. Landmark cases have shaped the legal landscape: Target settled with the National Federation of the Blind for $6 million in 2008, the first major web accessibility settlement. In 2019, the Supreme Court declined to hear Domino’s Pizza’s appeal in Robles v. Domino’s Pizza LLC, leaving intact the Ninth Circuit’s ruling that the ADA applies to websites and mobile apps connected to physical places of public accommodation. These cases and thousands of smaller settlements have created a powerful economic incentive for compliance.

The convergence of European regulation, American litigation, and standards adoption in Canada (Accessible Canada Act), Australia (Disability Discrimination Act), Israel (Equal Rights for Persons with Disabilities Law), and Japan (JIS X 8341) means that companies operating internationally increasingly face accessibility requirements in every major market. The question is no longer whether to invest in accessibility, but how to comply efficiently across multiple jurisdictions with varying standards.

WCAG 2.2: The Global Technical Standard

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, published by the W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), serve as the technical foundation for virtually every digital accessibility law worldwide. WCAG 2.1 (2018) is the most widely adopted version, while WCAG 2.2 (published October 5, 2023) adds nine new success criteria addressing focus management, dragging and target size for mobile users, cognitive accessibility, and authentication challenges. Both versions are organized around the POUR principles: Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, and Robust.

WCAG defines three conformance levels: A (minimum), AA (the standard adopted by most regulations), and AAA (enhanced). Level AA compliance requires, among other criteria, that all non-text content has text alternatives, that content is adaptable without loss of information, that contrast ratios meet minimum thresholds (4.5:1 for normal text), that all functionality is keyboard-accessible, that users have enough time to read and interact with content, that content does not cause seizures, that navigation is consistent and predictable, that input errors are identified and described, and that content is compatible with assistive technologies.

The practical compliance challenge is substantial. WebAIM’s 2025 analysis of one million home pages found that 94.8% had detectable WCAG 2 failures, with an average of 51 errors per page. The most common failures were low contrast text (79.1% of pages), missing alternative text for images (55.5%), missing form input labels (48.2%), empty links (45.4%), empty buttons (29.6%), and missing document language specification (15.8%). These six categories account for 96% of all detected errors. These are not obscure technical issues — they are fundamental usability problems that affect every user with a visual, motor, or cognitive impairment. The persistence of these failures despite decades of WCAG availability demonstrates that technical standards alone do not drive compliance; legal enforcement does.

The Business Case: Beyond Legal Compliance

The legal imperative for accessibility is clear, but the business case extends well beyond avoiding lawsuits and regulatory penalties. An estimated 1.3 billion people worldwide — 16% of the global population — live with significant disability, according to the WHO. This population controls substantial economic power: the annual disposable income of disabled people globally is estimated at $1.9 trillion according to the Return on Disability Group, and when accounting for friends and family who influence purchasing decisions, the broader disability market reaches an estimated $13 trillion in annual spending.

Accessibility improvements benefit far more users than those with disabilities. Captions help users watching videos in noisy environments or in non-native languages — a 2019 Verizon Media and Publicis Media study found that 80% of caption users do not have hearing impairments. Keyboard navigation benefits power users, users with temporary injuries (a broken arm), and users with situational limitations (holding a baby). High contrast and clear typography benefit users in bright sunlight, older users with declining vision, and users on low-quality displays. The “curb cut effect” — named after sidewalk curb cuts designed for wheelchair users that benefit everyone with strollers, luggage, or carts — applies extensively to digital design.

Search engine optimization (SEO) and accessibility are closely aligned. Descriptive alt text, semantic HTML structure, meaningful headings, and clear navigation — all accessibility requirements — are also factors that search engines use to index and rank content. A website that meets WCAG AA standards will generally perform better in search rankings than an equivalent inaccessible site. For e-commerce businesses, this dual benefit — serving disabled customers and improving search visibility — makes accessibility investment economically rational even without legal requirements.

The Overlay Controversy and the Path Forward

The growing regulatory pressure has spawned an “accessibility-as-a-service” industry that promises quick compliance through JavaScript overlays. Companies like accessiBe, AudioEye, UserWay, and EqualWeb offer widgets that can be added to websites with a single line of code, purportedly fixing accessibility issues automatically. AccessiBe, which raised $28 million in Series A funding in 2021 from K1 Investment Management, claimed its AI-powered overlay could make any website WCAG compliant within 48 hours.

The disability community and accessibility professionals have pushed back forcefully. The Overlay Fact Sheet (overlayfactsheet.com), signed by over 1,000 accessibility practitioners, argues that overlays do not and cannot fix fundamental accessibility problems. Screen reader users report that overlays frequently interfere with their existing assistive technology, creating new barriers rather than removing them. The National Federation of the Blind (NFB) revoked accessiBe’s convention sponsorship in 2021, citing the company’s dismissive treatment of blind accessibility experts and its misleading claims about automated WCAG compliance. Several companies that relied on overlays have been sued anyway — courts have found that overlays do not constitute ADA compliance, as demonstrated in the Murphy v. Eyebobs LLC case where the defendant’s use of an accessiBe overlay failed to prevent litigation.

In a landmark regulatory action, the Federal Trade Commission ordered accessiBe to pay $1 million in January 2025 for deceptive claims that its AI product could make websites WCAG-compliant. The FTC’s final order, approved in April 2025, bars the company from representing that its automated products can ensure WCAG compliance unless it has evidence to support such claims.

The legitimate path to accessibility is designing and building accessible products from the start (“shift left” approach) rather than attempting to retrofit accessibility onto inaccessible foundations. This requires integrating accessibility into design systems, development workflows, and quality assurance processes. Companies like Microsoft, Apple, and Google have invested heavily in accessibility teams and tooling — Apple’s VoiceOver, Google’s Accessibility Scanner, and Microsoft’s Accessibility Insights are industry-leading tools that are free and open source. The Deque Systems axe platform and WebAIM’s WAVE tool enable automated testing that can catch 30-40% of WCAG violations, with manual testing and user testing with disabled users covering the remainder.

For organizations beginning their accessibility journey, the recommended approach is: audit the current state (automated scan plus manual review), prioritize fixes by impact and frequency (fix the highest-traffic pages first), train development teams on accessible coding practices, establish accessibility as a requirement in design and QA processes, and implement ongoing monitoring rather than one-time remediation. The cost is typically 5-15% of development budgets for new projects and 15-30% for retrofit — significant but manageable, and far less than litigation costs.

Sources & Further Reading

• European Accessibility Act (Directive 2019/882) – EUR-Lex
• W3C WCAG 2.2 Web Content Accessibility Guidelines
• WebAIM Million 2025 – Annual Accessibility Analysis
• FTC Final Order Requiring accessiBe to Pay $1 Million (April 2025)
• ADA Web Accessibility Lawsuit Trends 2024 – Accessibility.Works
• WHO Fact Sheet: Disability and Health
• Overlay Fact Sheet
• NFB Convention Sponsorship Statement on accessiBe
• Return on Disability – Annual Report on the Global Economics of Disability