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
