What the accessibility law asks of you

Whom does it apply to?

The European Accessibility Act (EAA) is European legislation, transposed into national rules in the Netherlands. It has been in force since 28 June 2025. For websites and apps the Dutch Authority for Consumers and Markets (ACM) supervises it.

• Companies with ten or more employees and/or an annual turnover above two million euro.
• E-commerce services: websites and apps where someone can buy, sign up for or book something.
• Electronic communication services, such as chatting or (video) calling.
• In addition, more products and services fall under the law — with their own regulators per sector.

Which standard applies

The law prescribes no brand or vendor, but a standard: the European EN 301 549, which for websites and apps aligns with WCAG 2.1, level AA. That is the same bar the Dutch government already applies to its own sites.

In plain terms: your service must be usable with a keyboard alone, with a screen reader, with enlarged text and with enough contrast — and the meaning must not sit in colour alone.

What the regulator found

In March 2026 the ACM published its first systematic measurement, covering roughly a hundred of the largest Dutch web shops and the sites of major telecom and energy providers.

• 61 percent of the web shops examined turned out not to be digitally accessible.
• For a third, the problems are serious: ordering is possible, but takes a lot of effort.
• Concrete stumbling blocks: order buttons that cannot be operated with the keyboard, and captchas that make the site unusable.

The ACM is addressing the largest companies with the worst results and is involving people with lived experience in its supervision. Companies that fail to improve enough risk enforcement. Consumers can report an issue themselves to ACM ConsuWijzer.

What this means in practice

Accessibility is not a statement on your site. It is the question of whether someone going through your order with a screen reader can actually check out. That is measurable, and it is fixable.

Most of the problems the regulator names are not a rebuild. A button that is not a real button, a form field without a label, a contrast that is just too low, a captcha without an alternative: each of these is a small intervention, provided you know where they are.

What it usually does require is that accessibility becomes part of how you build and test — otherwise the same mistakes creep back in at the next release.

Where you can start

Start by knowing where you stand. An audit of your current site or app shows which problems there are, how severe they are and what it costs to fix them — in that order, so you can choose yourself what has to come first.

Sources

The figures and quotes on this page come from the regulator itself, not from us.

• ACM — Customers with a disability cannot shop at most large web shops (24 March 2026, in Dutch)
• ACM — Businesses, prepare for the accessibility rules for websites and apps (in Dutch)