EAA compliance, answered without the hand-waving

The EAA (Directive 2019/882) is EU law requiring a defined set of products and services — including ecommerce, banking, transport and digital services — to be accessible to people with disabilities. In practice, meeting it means your website and apps conform to WCAG 2.2 at Level AA, as reflected in the harmonised standard EN 301 549.

Businesses selling covered products or services to consumers in the EU — most notably ecommerce and B2C digital services. Microenterprises providing services (fewer than 10 staff and under €2m turnover) get an exemption for services, but that's narrower than most people assume, and it doesn't cover products. If you sell to EU consumers online, assume you're in scope until you've confirmed otherwise.

The EAA has applied since 28 June 2025. It is already in force. There are limited transition arrangements for some pre-existing service contracts and self-service terminals, but the core obligation for new digital services is live now — so this is a present risk, not a future one.

Enforcement is handled by each member state, and penalties vary — but they typically include fines, orders to bring the service into conformance, and in serious cases suspension of the service. Beyond regulators, non-compliance invites complaints from users and disadvantages you in any procurement process that checks accessibility.

If you offer ecommerce, digital services or covered products to consumers in the EU, most likely yes. The fastest way to find out where you stand is to run a free scan — you'll get a grade and an indicative risk band in under a minute, no account needed. For a definitive legal determination, pair that evidence with qualified advice.

We load your pages in a real headless Chrome browser and evaluate them with axe-core against WCAG 2.2 Level AA rules — things like colour contrast, missing alternative text, form labels, keyboard operability, heading structure and ARIA misuse. Every finding is cross-referenced to EN 301 549 so your evidence lines up with the European standard.

WCAG 2.2 is the global technical guideline for web content. EN 301 549 is the European harmonised standard that regulators point to — and for web content it incorporates WCAG. In short: you conform to WCAG at Level AA, and EN 301 549 is the framework that makes that conformance count for the EAA. Shield reports against both.

Honestly: automated tools can only reliably verify around a third of the WCAG success criteria. Contrast, missing labels and structural issues are catchable by machine; things like whether alt text is meaningful, or whether a page makes sense in reading order, need a human. We're upfront about this — Shield surfaces what it can prove and clearly flags what still needs manual review, rather than pretending a green light means you're fully compliant.

Yes. Shield follows internal links to crawl multiple pages in a single scan, so you're testing more than just the homepage. The number of pages per scan depends on your plan. The crawler respects your robots.txt, so it won't touch pages you've asked crawlers to leave alone.

No. Scanning is read-only — we load pages exactly as a normal visitor's browser would, at a considerate rate. We don't submit forms, make purchases, or change anything on your site. There's no plugin to install and nothing to add to your codebase.

Yes. Shield produces a formal EN 301 549 accessibility statement from your scan results — conformance status, known limitations, feedback route and assessment method — and exports it as a print-ready PDF. On Business and Agency plans you can apply a white-label accent so it goes out under your own brand.

Shield finds, prioritises and documents issues — it doesn't edit your site for you. What it does give your developers is a fix plan ranked by impact and effort, with element-level detail on each finding. On Business and Agency plans, each issue also comes with an AI-assisted remediation suggestion explaining the fix.

Yes. The prioritised fix plan exports to CSV, so you can drop it straight into your issue tracker or hand it to a contractor without copying anything out of a dashboard by hand.

We store your scan results and account details on infrastructure hosted within the EU. We only capture what's needed to report on accessibility — findings, page URLs and scores — not your customers' personal data. Scanning is read-only, so we never collect what visitors enter into your site.

Scan history is retained while your account is active so you have a defensible trend record over time. If you close your account, your data is deleted after a short grace period. You can request export or deletion of your data at any time.