Since the European Accessibility Act (EAA) came into force last year, digital accessibility is no longer an optional extra. Companies are legally required to meet WCAG 2.1 AA, and the first enforcement steps have already been taken. Yet a lot of uncertainty remains: how strictly is this checked, where do companies get stuck, and what does it actually deliver?
On digital accessibility, Follo works together with Eye-Able, a specialist in scanning and auditing websites for WCAG compliance. We spoke to David Speelman of Eye-Able about what is really changing and how organisations are handling this in practice.
Enforcement differs widely from country to country
The EAA is not enforced centrally from Europe, but is implemented by each member state. In Luxembourg, for example, action is immediate: digitally accessible or not, with fines to match. The Netherlands has taken a different approach. For now, the Dutch regulator ACM is focusing mainly on the largest players, which are actively checked on their accessibility plan. SMEs that fail to comply first receive a letter asking them to draw up a plan of action.
Where companies most often get stuck
Eye-Able sees a clear pattern in practice: companies tackle their website once, make improvements, and then slide back again. Common issues are insufficient text contrast and missing or incorrect alt text, often on precisely the smaller images that people with a disability need in order to navigate.
Digital accessibility is too often treated as a one-off project, while it should be a continuous process. Companies that score well have embedded accessibility structurally in their website and content strategy, so that nothing goes live without an accessibility check.
The benefits: more than compliance alone
Digital accessibility is not only about limiting risk. Websites that score well on WCAG:
- Perform better in AI search systems and search engines. Search engines and AI tools assess the underlying code, not how attractive a page looks. Accessible code consistently scores better there.
- Reach a larger audience. In the Netherlands, an estimated 4 million people have some form of disability that makes them dependent on accessible websites, from visual impairments to complete blindness or reliance on tab navigation.
- Prevent drop-off. An illogical heading order or broken tab navigation causes immediate drop-off, a problem every visitor is sensitive to, disability or not.
Practical advice: start with a triangle
For companies that still have to start, the advice is clear: find a specialist party, request a scan, and work from a collaboration between three parties: the organisation itself, an accessibility specialist, and the agency that carries out the actual improvements. Only in that combination do you get the best result.
This is exactly the collaboration that Follo and Eye-Able offer: Eye-Able scans, tests and monitors the website continuously against WCAG 2.1 AA, while Follo implements the improvements that come out of it directly in the website and takes them into the wider website and content strategy. That way accessibility never becomes a snapshot, but a fixed part of every change that goes live.
The sector itself is developing as well. Where the choice used to be between manual audits or automated scans, the new standard is a combination of both: automated monitoring, supplemented by manual checks for the final details. Here too, Eye-Able and Follo complement each other.
What can you expect in terms of enforcement?
Large-scale fines are not to be expected in the short term. For now, the ACM is holding back and betting on voluntary movement through information campaigns. An official government certification for digital accessibility does not yet exist in the Netherlands or in Europe, apart from the Dutch Digital Government Act that applies to government websites. Private certifications are an assessment by the issuing party, not a government recognition.
That does not make the legal obligation any less urgent. The law is clear, and the responsibility already lies with the company itself.
Getting started with digital accessibility
Do not wait until enforcement becomes concrete. Start with a scan, map out where your organisation stands, and build accessibility structurally into your website and content process.
Get in touch to discuss how we can set this up structurally for you.
