The European Accessibility Act has applied to new digital services since June 2025. Almost a year on, the honest summary is: no wave of fines, but a steady change in the weather. Accessibility clauses now appear in procurement as standard. Complaints that once went to an inbox now reference a law. And organisations serving EU members — which describes most international academic societies — have discovered that “based in the UK” is not the exemption some hoped it was.
What enforcement has looked like
Less courtroom, more correspondence. Market-surveillance bodies respond to complaints, and complaints come from users who couldn’t complete something that mattered: a membership renewal, a conference registration, a journal access request. The pattern across member states is a letter, a deadline, and an expectation of a credible plan. The organisations that struggle are not the imperfect ones — everyone is imperfect — but the ones with nothing on file: no statement, no audit, no owner.
The floor is WCAG 2.2 AA
In practice, conformance claims have settled on WCAG 2.2 AA as the reference point. From the audits we run on academic sites, the same five issues account for most failures: focus indicators that vanish on brand-coloured backgrounds, forms whose errors are announced to nobody, PDFs doing jobs that pages should do, carousels that trap keyboards, and contrast that passed when the brand was designed but failed when someone lightened the grey.
An honest position, in one afternoon
- Run an automated scan, then distrust it politely. Tools catch perhaps a third of real issues. They are a starting list, not a verdict.
- Do the keyboard hour. Unplug the mouse and complete your three most important journeys — join, register, contact. Where you get stuck, your members get stuck.
- Publish an accessibility statement that tells the truth. What conforms, what doesn’t yet, when it will, and who to contact. A truthful “not yet” is defensible; silence is not.
- Put accessibility in the definition of done. Every new page, every new component. Retrofits are how sites end up here annually.
The quiet benefit nobody budgets for: every fix on that list improves the site for everyone. Clearer focus states, forms that explain themselves, fewer PDFs. Compliance is simply the deadline; the work was always worth doing.
