European Accessibility Act: is your Belgian website covered and compliant?

The European Accessibility Act (EAA) has applied since 28 June 2025 and requires certain products and services to be digitally accessible to people with disabilities. Whether your Belgian website is covered depends on one main question: do you offer something to consumers through that site (buying, booking, banking) or is it purely B2B and informational? In this article you get a concrete decision tree, an overview of what does and does not fall under the law, what “compliant” precisely means and how to get in order in practice. This is guidance, not legal advice: when in doubt, have your situation assessed by a lawyer.

What exactly is the European Accessibility Act?

The EAA is a European directive (Directive (EU) 2019/882) that harmonises the accessibility requirements for a range of products and services across all EU member states. The goal is that people with a visual, auditory, motor or cognitive disability can use the same digital services as everyone else.

The directive had to be transposed into national law by 2022 and has been effectively in force since 28 June 2025. In Belgium, the transposition is split between the federal level and the regions and communities, depending on the type of service. Important not to confuse: government websites and public bodies were already covered by a separate rule (the Web Accessibility Directive). The EAA specifically targets the private sector and products and services offered to consumers.

Does your Belgian B2B website fall under the EAA?

The short answer: a purely B2B website that merely informs and collects leads generally stays outside the direct scope, but the exceptions matter more than the rule. The EAA protects consumers, after all. As long as an interface is used exclusively by people acting in their profession or trade, the law in principle does not apply.

Work through this decision tree for your site:

1. Do you sell, book or reserve something online? Can a visitor buy, order or reserve a product or service on your site? Then there is e-commerce and you fall in scope, even if your audience is mainly business. The law looks at the function, not at your marketing label.
2. Do you offer a financial, telecom, transport or e-book service to consumers? Then you automatically fall under the specific services the EAA names.
3. Is your site purely informational, with company info, content and a contact or quote form? A purely informational site without an online purchase or transaction in principle falls outside scope. A classic B2B lead website usually sits in this box.
4. Are your “B2B” pages in practice also used by individual consumers? If you have public pricing pages, a webshop section or self-service that a private individual can purchase, you can still fall within scope. The line lies with who can use the service in practice.
5. Are you a micro-enterprise? For services there is an exception for micro-enterprises: fewer than 10 employees and an annual turnover or balance sheet total of at most 2 million euros. For products it is more nuanced, so do not count yourself rich too quickly with this exception.

Most B2B companies we support at Customer Impact end up, with their lead-generating website, in box 3 and are therefore not legally obliged. But that is no free pass, as becomes clear further on.

Which products and services are covered?

The EAA lists a delineated set of consumer-facing products and services. For the digital part this includes, among others, e-commerce for consumers, consumer banking services, electronic communication services (telecom), access to audiovisual media services, e-books and certain passenger transport services. On the hardware side, think of payment terminals, ticketing machines and cash machines.

For most B2B websites, e-commerce is the relevant trigger. If you sell directly to end users from your site, for example a SaaS subscription that a self-employed person or consumer can take out themselves, or a webshop section, that is the signal you must take accessibility seriously. A quote request or demo form without online payment usually is not.

What does “compliant” mean concretely?

Being compliant means, in practice, that your website meets WCAG 2.1 level AA. WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) is the international standard for web accessibility, and the European harmonised standard EN 301 549 refers to WCAG 2.1 AA as the benchmark. Newer versions such as WCAG 2.2 exist, but at the time of writing are not yet incorporated into the harmonised standard, so 2.1 AA remains the workable reference point.

What that means in plain language for your site:

• Text and contrast: sufficient colour contrast and text you can enlarge without the layout breaking.
• Keyboard navigation: everything usable without a mouse, with a visible focus indicator.
• Alternative text: descriptive alt text for meaningful images.
• Forms: clear labels, error messages and instructions that a screen reader can read out. This overlaps strongly with good conversion-focused forms, because what is accessible often converts better too.
• Structure: a logical heading hierarchy and semantic HTML, so assistive software can interpret your page.

In the overview of the most common accessibility mistakes you can read where things usually go wrong in practice.

If you officially fall outside scope, do you then have to do nothing?

Even if you formally do not fall under the EAA, accessibility is rarely something to ignore, and that is not a moralising speech but a business argument. Accessible sites are more usable for everyone, not only for people with a disability. Clear contrasts, a logical structure and good forms increase your conversion and lower your threshold to a lead.

On top of that, many accessibility principles overlap with what search engines and AI search systems value: a clean semantic structure, descriptive texts and fast, usable pages. It is therefore not a cost detached from your growth, but strengthens your B2B UX and usability. And the scope of this kind of regulation tends to get broader rather than narrower over the years, so whoever lays an accessible foundation now will not have to rebuild in a panic later. That fits how we look at websites: honest about what is required and what is smart, and building for leads and the long term.

How do you become compliant?

You are best off tackling this in a logical order, not with a stand-alone plugin that promises to fix everything (those so-called overlay tools rarely truly solve the problem).

1. Determine your scope. Establish with your team, and when in doubt a lawyer, whether and which parts of your site fall under the EAA.
2. Run an audit. Test your most important pages and flows against WCAG 2.1 AA, with a combination of automated tools and manual tests with keyboard and screen reader.
3. Prioritise by impact. Start with the paths that matter most: purchase or contact flows, forms, navigation and templates that recur on many pages.
4. Build it in structurally. Solve it in your templates and design system, so new pages are automatically accessible. Accessibility is not a one-off sprint but a maintenance standard.
5. Document and repeat. Keep track of what you did and retest after every major change or redesign.

Whether you build in Webflow, WordPress or a headless setup: accessibility is platform-independent and depends mostly on how neatly you set up your templates and components. No platform makes you automatically compliant. If you build specifically for the Belgian market, language often comes into play alongside accessibility; see our approach to building a bilingual website (NL/FR).

The short summary

The European Accessibility Act has applied since 28 June 2025 and targets products and services for consumers. If you sell, book or bank online towards end users, you fall in scope and must work towards WCAG 2.1 AA. A classic B2B lead website with only info and a contact form usually falls outside the direct obligation, but accessibility remains a sensible investment in conversion and sustainability even then. Want to know where your site stands? Then read the broader guide on having a B2B website built or look at our approach to website development.

Schedule your free intake and we will look together at whether your site falls under the EAA and what an accessible, conversion-focused foundation means for you.