This time last year, the owner of a children's clothing e-shop called me. He'd just sorted out his cookie banner, paid for it, breathed out. Then he ran into the abbreviation EAA and the word accessibility. "David, is this another GDPR? Do I pay someone five thousand again and hope it's enough?" It's not another GDPR. But it's also not something you can ignore.
The European Accessibility Act (EAA) has applied since 28 June 2025. In the Czech Republic it is implemented by law 424/2023 Sb. It mainly covers e-shops, banks, booking systems, and other digital services for consumers. The standard is WCAG 2.1 level AA. Microenterprises providing services are largely exempt, and e-shops launched before 28 June 2025 have a transition period until 28 June 2030. The fine can reach CZK 10 million. This article is about what that actually means for you one year in - without the panic and without selling you fear.
What the European Accessibility Act is (and isn't)
The EAA is an EU directive from 2019 (formally Directive 2019/882). The goal is for digital services and some products to be usable by someone who can't see well, can't hear, or simply can't get a mouse exactly where they want it. In Czech law it lands as 424/2023 Sb. on accessibility requirements for certain products and services, in force since 28 June 2025.
What it isn't: it's not GDPR and it's not cookie consent. Cookies were about consent and tracking. This is about usability. No banner fixes it, no checkbox. Either your site can be operated with a keyboard and read by a screen reader, or it can't.
The second difference: accessibility for government, school, and hospital sites has been handled by an older law since 2019. What's new is the pressure on the private sector. If you sell online, this is the first time accessibility applies to you by law.
Who it covers, and who it doesn't
The short version: if you enter into contracts with consumers through your website, you're probably in. The law targets:
- E-shops - any sale of goods or services to a consumer online.
- Banking and payment services for consumers.
- Booking and ticketing systems - transport, travel tickets, event tickets.
- Telecoms and access to audiovisual services.
- E-books and their readers.
And now the exemption people get wrong most often. A microenterprise providing a service is exempt. Microenterprise means fewer than 10 employees and at the same time an annual turnover or balance sheet total of up to EUR 2 million. That 'at the same time' matters. If you have three people and turnover under EUR 2 million, your e-shop is not covered right now.
Two catches. First, the exemption applies to services, not products. If you manufacture, import, or distribute something (typically hardware), the accessibility requirements apply to you even as a microenterprise. Second, you're not a microenterprise forever. You hire a fifth, sixth, tenth person, you cross the turnover line, and suddenly you're inside. Building today's site so that accessibility is deferred because you're small is postponing the problem, not solving it.
And the most important date for most of you: a transition period until 28 June 2030. E-shops and services that were running before 28 June 2025 don't have to be accessible overnight. They have five years. That's not an excuse to do nothing, but it does mean you don't need to panic this week and pay the first firm that emails you.
What an accessible site means in practice
The standard is WCAG 2.1 level AA, technically through the harmonised standard EN 301 549. It sounds like something for developers, and part of it is. But half of what an audit looks for is understandable to anyone. A few concrete examples of what actually gets tested:
- Keyboard operation. Can you get through the whole site and buy something using only Tab, Enter, and the arrow keys? Plenty of people don't use a mouse.
- Text contrast. Light grey text on a white background looks elegant in Figma and is unreadable for a large share of people over fifty. AA wants a ratio of at least 4.5:1 for normal text.
- Alt text on images. A screen reader reads the alt text. When it's missing, a blind user hears only the word image and nothing else.
- Form labels. Every field needs its own
<label>. A placeholder instead of a label is a common and easily fixed mistake. - Visible focus. When you tab around, you have to see where you are. Many designers turn the focus outline off because it 'ruins the design'. That's exactly what's failing now.
- Captions on video and a sensible heading structure (H1, H2, H3 in order, not by font size).
When we wrote about accessibility basics before, it was mostly about decency and a few percent more customers. Now it's a legal requirement. We covered a lot of it in the piece on the five accessibility features every website should have, and contrast specifically in the article on an accessible color palette.
Fines and enforcement: no panic, but start
The upper limit on the fine is CZK 10 million. A number that quotes well and is understood badly. The reality of the first year looks different: supervisory bodies are running mostly in an advisory mode. You're more likely to get a warning and a deadline to fix things than the maximum penalty. The full fine is a tool for those who repeatedly and knowingly ignore it.
That doesn't mean the law is toothless. The risk isn't only the fine. It's a complaint from a customer, it's a competitor who finishes sooner and points at you, and from 2030 it's a situation where you no longer have any transition period left. My honest view: nobody's shutting you down next week, but the companies that treat this as a five-year plan and start this year will be better off than the ones that come back to it in a May 2030 panic.
A five-step audit you can do this afternoon
Before you pay anyone for an audit, get a rough idea yourself. Thirty minutes, no paid tools.
- Put the mouse aside. Go through the site with the keyboard only - Tab, Shift+Tab, Enter. Can you reach the menu, the cart, the checkout form? Wherever you get stuck, that's a problem.
- Measure contrast. Open the WebAIM Contrast Checker or the axe DevTools extension and run the main text and buttons through it. Anything under 4.5:1 for normal text needs fixing.
- Turn on a screen reader. VoiceOver on a Mac (Cmd+F5) or NVDA on Windows, free. Have it read the homepage and one product page. Do you hear meaning, or just link, link, image?
- Check forms and images. Does every field have a label? Do images have alt text? Even a free online checker like WAVE will reveal this.
- Write an accessibility statement. A page where you say how things stand and where to write if someone hits a barrier. It shows good faith and counts with the regulator.
This won't tell you everything, but it tells you how deep in the problem you are. A site that gets through on the keyboard and has decent contrast is most of the way there. A site where you get stuck at the menu needs more than cosmetics - it's probably one of the signs it's time for a redesign.
Three myths I hear most often
It's only for government sites. It was. Since June 2025 the pressure is on the private sector, mostly e-shops. That's the change.
I'll drop in an overlay widget and I'm done. This is the most expensive mistake. The overlay is that floating little icon that promises to make a site accessible with one line of code. It doesn't work. Real screen reader users mostly switch it off because it gets in their way, and in the US, companies with an overlay get sued more often than those without one. Accessibility is done in the code and the content, not by gluing a layer on top. One line of code worked for cookie consent, as we described with Consentio. For accessibility it doesn't.
We're a microenterprise, this doesn't apply to us, end of story. Maybe not today. But the exemption is tied to size and applies to services only. Grow, or start selling a physical product, and you're in. And even if not - an accessible site sells more, because an older customer and someone squinting at a phone in the sun can both use it. That was true before the law too.
What to do now
If I have to put it in one sentence: don't panic, but don't shut your eyes either. If you're an e-shop launched before June 2025, you have until 2030 - use it to fold accessibility into your next redesign, not to let it sit for five years. If you're only now building a new site, build it accessible from the start. Redoing it later at five times the cost makes no sense.
At Kosmoweb we run accessibility audits against WCAG 2.1 AA and either send you the list of what to fix or fix it for you as part of project support. When you're building a new site, we handle accessibility upfront as part of web development. And if you're not sure whether the law applies to you at all, get in touch - fifteen minutes free, and we'll tell you whether you're a microenterprise that's out of scope or not, and what's realistically needed. We'll leave the fine-scaring to others.