You bought the accessibility certificate instead of the better website

The European Accessibility Act took effect in June 2025, and in many companies its first year followed the same script as GDPR once did: panic first, then an audit was purchased, then a report appeared in a folder and daily work continued untouched.¹ In fairness, some businesses fall outside the service requirements entirely, since the law exempts the smallest microenterprises, and in a large organisation a formal audit can be a perfectly sensible purchase. The most common mistake was not the wrong scope but the wrong purchase. Accessibility was understood as a certificate you acquire, when it is a property you build. The certificate expires with the next site update. The property serves every visitor, every day.

What the law requires, and from whom

The directive covers online stores and consumer-facing digital services among others, and its technical backbone is the same WCAG guideline set that public sector sites have been bound to for years.² In practice the requirements are more ordinary than the legal language suggests: sufficient contrast, a site that works from a keyboard, text alternatives for images, forms whose error messages a human can understand.

Even where the law does not oblige you, it rewards reading. The requirement list is a free and unusually well-tested description of what an easy-to-use website looks like. Few consultants hand out a specification of that quality without an invoice attached.

A checklist is not the same as a working page

An audit report tells you which criteria pass. It does not tell you whether a customer gets their task done. The difference is visible in the wild: a site can clear the technical inspection and still be structurally confusing, linguistically heavy, and a punishment on a phone. The criterion passes, the customer leaves.

The reverse rarely happens. A site genuinely designed to be easy to use meets most of the requirements as a by-product, because the requirements are, at bottom, the basics of usability translated into legal language. The order of operations sets the cost: usability first makes accessibility nearly free, compliance first makes it a project you buy again every year.

Who this is actually for

Accessibility debates shrink easily into an image of a small special group, and that is an arithmetic error. A large share of the population benefits directly: eyesight declines with age for everyone, motor control varies, and Europe is ageing at a pace that turns large type and clear buttons into a growing market advantage.

Everyone else benefits indirectly, because the same structure serves the person squinting at a screen in bright sun, carrying a child with one arm, or reading in a hurry. Clean heading structure and descriptive text are also precisely what search engines and AI assistants feed on, so the same work improves findability. The audience is not a margin. The audience is every tired person holding a phone.

One year in, two schools

The first year sorted companies into two groups. One treated the directive as a one-off project that ended with a report, and there every site refresh restarts the work from zero. The other folded the requirements into how content gets made, and there accessibility stopped being a separate cost at all.¹

The second group received something nobody ordered: the obligation to simplify stripped away exactly the clutter no one would otherwise have dared to propose removing. The constraint did the designing, and the result is a better page for everyone.

The inconvenient part

Buying the certificate feels safe because it converts a vague obligation into one invoice and one folder of paper. The safety is borrowed: the next content update, the next campaign page, or the next new hire starts the erosion the same day. Accessibility built as a property does not erode that way, because it lives in the way of working rather than in a report. So the question is not whether your site complies today. The question is which one you bought last year, the paper or the better website, and which one you intend to buy next year?

From words to done.

Sources

1. Spoken, a Finnish review of the directive’s first year in practice (2025-2026). https://spoken.fi/vuosi-esteettomyysdirektiivin-voimaantulosta-mita-yritykset-oppivat-2025-2026/
2. Eficode, summary of the European Accessibility Act’s requirements and scope. https://www.eficode.com/fi/esteettomyysdirektiivi