The European Accessibility Act came into force on 28 June 2025. Nine months in, enforcement authorities across the EU have begun their compliance reviews. Ireland's Competition and Consumer Protection Commission has started issuing guidance to businesses selling products and services online.

Here is what it means if you run a business website in Ireland.

What the Act Actually Requires

The EAA, transposed into Irish law through the European Union (Accessibility Requirements of Products and Services) Regulations 2023, sets baseline accessibility standards for digital products and services sold within the EU. If your website sells products, takes bookings, or provides services online, the Act applies to you.

The technical standard underpinning the EAA is WCAG 2.1 Level AA, as defined by the W3C. In practical terms, that means your website must be usable by people with visual, hearing, motor, and cognitive disabilities. Screen readers need to navigate your pages properly. Forms need to be keyboard-accessible. Images need descriptive alt text. Colour contrast needs to meet defined minimum ratios.

Why does this matter commercially? The CSO's Census 2022 found that roughly one in five people in Ireland, around 22% of the population, reported a long-lasting condition or difficulty. That is not a niche audience. That is a significant portion of your potential customer base who cannot use your website properly if it fails basic accessibility standards.

Who Is Affected, and Who Is Not

This is where I see the most confusion among business owners I talk to.

Microenterprises providing services are exempt. If your business has fewer than 10 employees and turns over less than EUR 2 million annually, the EAA's service requirements do not apply to you. The CCPC's published guidance for microenterprises confirms this, and it covers a large proportion of Irish businesses.

But the exemption only covers services. If you manufacture or sell physical products covered by the Act, the accessibility requirements apply regardless of your size. And if your business grows past those thresholds, you come into scope immediately. The exemption is a legal floor, not a permanent shield.

There is a broader commercial point here too. Consider a craft brewery in Kilkenny selling online. They might technically fall under the exemption today. But an inaccessible checkout is still turning away roughly one in five potential customers. The law might not require them to fix it. Their revenue probably does.

WCAG 2.1 Level AA is the accessibility standard underpinning the EAA

What Non-Compliance Actually Costs

Ireland's implementation is notably stricter than most EU member states. As Mason Hayes Curran noted in their analysis of the Irish regulations, penalties on summary conviction include fines of up to EUR 5,000 or up to six months' imprisonment. On indictment, that rises to EUR 60,000 or up to 18 months. Ireland is, as far as I can determine from the published regulations across member states, the only EU country that includes criminal penalties for serious non-compliance.

Before anyone panics: enforcement follows a remediation-first model. Authorities issue a notice, give you a defined period to fix the problem, and only escalate if you ignore it. Nobody is getting fined tomorrow for a missing alt tag.

But the direction is clear. The 2030 deadline for bringing existing content into compliance is approaching, and enforcement will tighten as it does.

The more pressing cost is commercial. An inaccessible website does not just risk a fine. It loses customers who cannot complete a purchase, cannot read your menu, cannot fill in your contact form. Every day your site fails basic accessibility, you are competing with one hand tied behind your back.

What This Means for Your Website Right Now

WordPress, which powers somewhere north of 42% of all websites according to W3Techs' latest data, has a genuine structural advantage here. The platform's theme and plugin ecosystem includes accessibility-focused options that handle much of the compliance work: proper heading hierarchy, keyboard navigation, ARIA labels, contrast compliance.

That said, running WordPress does not automatically mean running an accessible website. A poorly coded theme with inadequate contrast ratios and missing semantic markup is non-compliant regardless of the platform underneath it. WordPress gives you the tools. The right setup still matters.

This is where hosting and infrastructure decisions connect to compliance. A platform where design, hosting, and infrastructure come included for EUR 60 per year removes the overhead of rebuilding from scratch. The accessibility work narrows to content decisions and theme choices rather than a ground-up reconstruction. If you are retrofitting a budget theme from 2019 on bare-bones shared hosting, the total cost of your current setup starts looking very different once you factor in compliance.

The practical steps themselves are not complicated. Verify your theme meets WCAG 2.1 AA standards. Check colour contrast ratios. Add descriptive alt text to every image. Ensure forms work with keyboard navigation alone. Test with a screen reader. WordPress plugins like WP Accessibility can identify gaps, though as the W3C has been clear about, automated overlay widgets alone do not constitute compliance. They flag issues. They do not fix the underlying code.

The Practical Upshot

The European Accessibility Act is not going away. Its scope will only widen as the 2030 deadline for existing content draws closer. For most Irish businesses, particularly those running a modern WordPress setup with accessibility-ready themes and properly configured infrastructure, the work required is manageable.

The businesses that act now gain a commercial advantage among roughly a fifth of the population who currently struggle with most websites. The businesses that wait get a compliance headache later and miss those customers in the meantime.

The question is not really about legal risk. It is about whether your website works for everyone who wants to give you their money.