Accessibility Is Now Expensive to Ignore

The European Accessibility Act went into enforcement in June 2025. If you're designing digital products that serve EU customers, this applies to you. Not just government sites. Private sector. E-commerce. Banking. Mobile apps.

Fines go up to three million euros. That's a 3 with six zeros. In euros.

Products can be pulled from the market entirely.

Most posts about the EAA focus on the deadline and the penalties. Scroll past those. The teams that already design with accessibility in mind aren't scrambling. This isn't a fire drill for them. It's Tuesday.

The EAA maps closely to WCAG 2.1 AA, which means the fundamentals haven't changed. Color contrast. Keyboard navigation. Screen reader compatibility. Alt text. The same things that have been best practice for years are now the legal baseline across 27 countries.

Designers have always been part of accessibility work. Checking contrast, specifying reading order for screen readers, writing alt text guidance. What changed is the weight behind it. A 3.2:1 contrast ratio on body text in your Figma file used to be a best practice miss. Now it's a compliance gap with a price tag.

Here's what's worth knowing: 75% of organizations that invested in accessibility reported it directly improved revenue. Only 27% start addressing it during the design phase. That gap is where the opportunity lives.

You can treat accessibility as a last-minute audit that costs you three months and a consultant's invoice. Or you can build it into your foundational workflows, your component libraries, your review process, where it stops being a regulation and becomes how your team designs by default.

One of those options comes with a fine. The other comes with better products. Choose wisely.