CTO at Deque Systems and author of the “Agile Accessibility Handbook, A Practical Guide to Accessible Software Development at Scale.”
The European Accessibility Act (EAA) is an EU directive that aims to improve digital accessibility for people with disabilities and the aging population, while also creating a larger, more unified market for accessible products and services.
If your business sells into or within the EU, the EAA applies to you—regardless of where your company is based. This means that all your new and updated digital content must now be accessible.
There’s no question that the EAA, which took effect June 28, 2025, is disruptive, and the fines and penalties should not be underestimated. Fortunately, EAA compliance doesn’t have to be overwhelming.
In this post, I discuss how AI and automation can help you meet short-term EAA requirements, manage the disruption and lay the groundwork for long-term growth.
Achieve speed and accuracy with AI and automation.
Leveraging AI and automation for digital accessibility testing and remediation is the fastest, easiest and most accurate way to find and fix your issues, while minimizing the legal, financial and reputational risk that can come with non-compliance.
Keep in mind that speed without accuracy increases your risk—you can end up creating new issues even as you’re trying to fix existing ones. And accuracy without speed also increases risk. You must be able to test as fast as you build; otherwise, inaccessible content is going to slip through.
Automated and AI-powered tools are essential for quickly and successfully scaling digital accessibility. However, not all tools are created equal.
Choose the right tools.
The right tools make it easy to integrate digital accessibility into your existing workflows and achieve measurably positive results. The wrong tools introduce friction and create more problems than they solve.
Overlays, LLMs trained on inaccessible code, and generalized testing tools not optimized for digital accessibility will overwhelm your teams with false positives. This will artificially inflate the scope of your digital accessibility debt, costing you both time and money as you try to determine what does and doesn’t actually need to be addressed.
With generalized tools, you can’t be confident you’re getting accurate guidance. You need tools that draw on a reliable and trustworthy digital accessibility knowledge base. For example, generative AI chatbots, purpose-built for digital accessibility and trained on comprehensive accessibility data, can deliver fast, expert-backed accessibility answers in the same tools developers are using every day.
Close expertise gaps with agentic AI.
AI—and especially agentic AI—can be a game-changer. Integrating reliable tools using the standardized model context protocol (MCP) enables you to pull predictable, high-quality accessibility knowledge and tools directly into your AI agent. You can leverage AI agents to understand the code and the user’s intent and arrive at a solution that you can trust is accessible.
With this approach, you’re not just finding and fixing issues; you’re doing it efficiently, speeding up the development lifecycle while keeping humans in the loop. Your developers don’t have to be accessibility experts on day one, but they can quickly create accessible experiences as they learn.
Provide role-specific knowledge to maintain velocity.
Everyone has a part to play in accessibility: designers, developers, testers, project owners, program managers and more. However, needs and requirements differ. While designers must create designs that avoid accessibility pitfalls, developers must implement them correctly and testers must validate that they meet accessibility standards.
By providing knowledge for individual roles across the organization, you’ll help your teams maintain velocity while they learn new tools and adapt processes. Over time, they’ll continue to expand their skills and develop greater accessibility expertise.
Build long-term digital accessibility momentum.
It’s not enough to achieve compliance once—you must maintain it. Remember, every future release and update must be accessible. While automation can catch many issues, it won’t catch everything.
Long-term digital accessibility involves the holistic integration of AI and automation alongside manual and guided testing approaches. It requires that your organization shift and begin factoring in digital accessibility from the start. The ultimate goal is not to fix issues efficiently, but to increase efficiency by not creating issues in the first place.
Gain broad benefits from EAA compliance.
EAA compliance has benefits that go far beyond avoidance of risks and penalties. Accessible content improves UX, makes for better and more usable products and enhances your organization’s reputation as a customer-centric company.
By being accessible, you’ll also expand your market share. The number of people with disabilities worldwide is estimated to be more than 1 billion people, exceeding 15% of the overall worldwide population. The spending power of people with disabilities and their families is over $13 trillion globally. By making your products and services accessible, you’re opening your business up to a vast consumer population.
Start meeting EAA requirements now.
The EAA can be disruptive. Fortunately, with the right digital accessibility tools, knowledge and processes, your organization can quickly meet EAA requirements, minimizing the disruption and impact on your digital roadmap.
Your most pressing objective is to ensure all new and updated digital content is accessible. This is an achievable goal, provided that you choose your automated, AI-powered digital accessibility testing tools wisely.
Being proactive—from the tools you choose to the policies and procedures you establish—is the right approach for achieving and maintaining EAA compliance and building a long-term, sustainable digital accessibility program.
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