Does the European Accessibility Act apply to you? If you employ fewer than 10 people, probably not.

I sell a tool that helps with European Accessibility Act compliance, so this is an odd article to write: most of the people currently being sold tools like mine do not have to comply with anything.

The exemption is not obscure. It is one sentence in the directive, and it has been there since 2019.

The sentence

Article 4(5) of Directive (EU) 2019/882:

Microenterprises providing services shall be exempt from complying with the accessibility requirements referred to in paragraph 3 of this Article and any obligations relating to the compliance with those requirements.

Note what it exempts you from. Not just the accessibility requirements — and any obligations relating to the compliance with those requirements. That second half is the accessibility statement, the Annex V information, the documentation. All of it.

Are you a microenterprise?

The definition is in Article 3, and it is the part people get wrong:

'microenterprise' means an enterprise which employs fewer than 10 persons and which has an annual turnover not exceeding EUR 2 million or an annual balance sheet total not exceeding EUR 2 million

Read the conjunctions carefully, because two different mistakes live here.

The headcount is an and. Fewer than 10 persons is mandatory. Nine people and €30 million of turnover is not a microenterprise.

The money is an or. You need turnover under €2 million or balance sheet total under €2 million, not both. I have seen this stated as two thresholds you must clear together, which is stricter than the directive and pushes people into obligations they do not have.

So: fewer than ten people, and one of the two financial figures under two million. That is a very large share of the businesses being marketed accessibility compliance products right now.

The trap: services, not products

The exemption says microenterprises providing services. It does not exempt microenterprises placing products on the market.

For most people reading this the distinction is academic, because a website is a service, and e-commerce services are explicitly inside the scope of the directive under Article 2(2), alongside consumer banking, e-books, passenger transport, electronic communications and audiovisual media access services.

But if you also manufacture, import or distribute something physical that falls under the products side of the EAA — self-service terminals, e-readers, consumer terminal equipment with interactive computing capability — being a microenterprise does not get you out of that. Different half of the directive, different rules.

Why you probably have not heard this

Because the honest answer costs the sale. A vendor whose landing page opens with a fine figure and a deadline has no commercial reason to add "though if you have eight employees, none of this applies to you."

I am not above this. My own statement generator asserted compliance for anyone who clicked through it, including people who owed nothing, until I went back and added the question. It now asks whether you are a microenterprise before anything else, and if you say yes it stops asserting conformity, cites Article 4(5), and frames whatever you publish as voluntary.

What the exemption does not mean

It does not mean your users disappeared. The share of people who need captions, keyboard operation, or sufficient contrast is exactly what it was before you read Article 4(5). The commercial case for an accessible checkout has never depended on a directive, and the people who cannot complete yours are still not completing yours.

It does not mean nothing else applies. The EAA is a directive, transposed into 27 national laws, and Member States had room to move. National equality and anti-discrimination law is separate and generally older. If you sell into the United States, the ADA is an entirely different question with an active litigation industry attached. If you are a public sector body, or a supplier to one, you are under Directive 2016/2102 instead, which is where that familiar five-heading statement template comes from.

And it does not mean you should publish a conformity claim anyway. This is the part worth stopping on. If you are exempt and you publish a statement asserting that your service meets the accessibility requirements, you have volunteered into an exposure the law had spared you: a public, written, verifiable claim about your own product. If it is inaccurate, the fact that you never had to make it is not a defence.

The FTC's 2025 action against accessiBe turned on claims — that a product made sites WCAG compliant, that it kept them compliant, and that the company's own promotional articles were presented as independent reviews. The lesson generalises past overlays: what gets you in trouble is usually not the state of your site, it is what you said about it.

If you are exempt and want to do it anyway

Good — most people should, and it is cheaper than the marketing suggests.

Publish information rather than a conformity claim. Say what you have tested, what you know is broken, and how someone reaches a human if they hit a wall. That last one is the single most useful line on any accessibility page and it costs nothing.

Say plainly that you are publishing voluntarily under Article 4(5). It is accurate, it is verifiable, and it is a stronger position than a claim you cannot fully stand behind.

Then fix things in the order that they hurt: keyboard operation of your checkout, form labels, contrast, alternative text. An automated scan — mine or anyone else's — will find a useful fraction of that and will not find the rest. No scanner can tell you whether your error message makes sense to somebody who cannot see the field it refers to.

The caveats that belong here

I am not a lawyer. I am a developer who read the directive because a marketplace reviewer proved I had built the wrong document, and I have been checking my assumptions against the primary text ever since rather than against other people's summaries.

Whether the obligation reaches you depends on where you operate, what you sell, and how your Member State transposed it. Headcount and turnover are also defined terms with rules about linked and partner enterprises — if you are near the threshold, or part of a group, that is a question for an accountant and not for an article.

What I am reasonably confident of is narrower, and you can check it yourself in about five minutes on EUR-Lex: Article 4(5) exempts microenterprises providing services from the accessibility requirements and from the obligations attached to them, and Article 3 defines a microenterprise as fewer than 10 persons with turnover or balance sheet total under €2 million.

If that is you, the correct amount to spend on EAA compliance software is zero, and you should spend it on an accessible checkout instead.

Sources: Directive (EU) 2019/882 · Directive (EU) 2016/2102 · FTC v. accessiBe