Since June 2025, the European Accessibility Act has stopped being a best-practice recommendation. It's law, with concrete obligations and possible penalties attached. By 2026, the question isn't "should we make the site accessible" it's "what does it cost us that we haven't."

A lot of SMEs still assume web accessibility is only a concern for large corporations or the public sector. That assumption gets expensive fast. Here's what the EAA and RGAA actually cover, and how to get compliant without starting over.

What the EAA Actually Covers

The European Accessibility Act applies to a wide range of digital products and services: e-commerce sites, online banking, ticketing, and more broadly any digital service offered to the public across the EU. Exemptions exist for micro-enterprises based on specific size and revenue thresholds but they don't automatically clear every SME, and are worth checking case by case rather than assumed.

RGAA: France's Technical Reference, Level AA

In France, RGAA remains the technical implementation standard, aligned with level AA of the international WCAG guidelines. The EAA sets the legal obligation at the EU level; RGAA provides the technical method to meet it in practice, with precise, testable success criteria.

The Most Common Accessibility Failures We Find in Audits

• Insufficient color contrast light text on light backgrounds, often invisible to low-vision users.
• Missing image alt text nothing for screen readers to read, and nothing for search engines to index either.
• Broken keyboard navigation impossible to navigate without a mouse, which excludes a whole category of users.
• Forms without explicit labels an "empty" field for a screen reader, even if it looks obvious visually.
• Dynamic content that isn't announced a notification appearing on screen without being signaled to assistive technology.