A handicap parking space with a yellow wheelchair symbol

Mitigate impact on your company with drunomics and mossbo

The European Accessibility Act Impacts Everyone

21.05.2025,

Have you ever heard of the EAA? You should have. The European Accessibility Act of 2025 (German: Barrierefreiheitsstärkungsgesetz), in short, is a set of minimum accessibility standards that companies are required by the European Union to fulfill. The act is designed to ensure disabled person’s “full and effective participation in society on an equal basis with others”. (1)

“The Act mandates that a range of products and services such as consumer electronics (TVs, smartphones, computers, gaming consoles, etc.), ticketing and vending machines, websites and mobile acts, among others, comply with accessibility requirements for persons with disabilities.” (emphasis added) (2)

And that “implementing accessibility features to products, services, and environments, is essential to ensure that persons with disabilities are not prevented from accessing and using them.” (3)

The EU has set the 28 of June, 2025 (4) as the deadline for all EU countries on which they must enforce the EAA within their country. Services (websites) created after this date are required to adhere to the law. Previously existing services (i.e. websites) have a 5-year extension to this date, allowing the organization until June 28, 2030 before they must fully comply with the law. Austrian companies choosing to ignore this directive can receive penalties of up to €80,000 in fines.

In short, if your website is intended for public consumption, then it must adhere to the EAA. It must be usable by a screen reader. In fact, it must fulfill a plethora of standards. Although not explicitly stated in the law, the generally accepted guideline is that the WCAG 2.1 standard is used to measure compliance. And the law states that periodic review of continued adherence to these standards is required. The member states are responsible for ensuring that companies and organizations adhere to the standards.

Key Website Accessibility Standards

The EAA prioritizes the implementation of standards. For websites, relevant standards are defined via the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). Fulfilling the Level requirements allows for a badge (icon) to be placed on the website. Some of the most important standards include:

Aria tags for screen readers
Alternative texts for images
Keyboard Operability including focus order and focus visibility
Proper section headings for simple page navigation

A good starting point for measuring your website’s conformity is Google Chrome’s Lighthouse check for accessibility. Better, and eventually required by EAA, will be an external audit of the website.

How mossbo & drunomics Comply with the EAA

The most cost-effective way to implement the EAA standards is to plan them from the start. drunomics’ own managed cloud CMS solution, mossbo®, is built upon the open source content management system Drupal®, which incorporates accessibility into its design process (5), and a Nuxt frontend. The Nuxt frontend theme for mossbo was already audited by our accessibility expert Wolfgang Leitner at drunomics.

The results of his audit showed us that we had already planned and achieved a good basis for conformity, but there is always room for improvement. We took on that challenge and made several small but important enhancements to mossbo. We ensured that menu links had the correct meta data and aria markup so that they could be properly read via screenreader and navigated via keyboard. The theme was tweaked so that adequate contrast of text to background was used even for minor elements such as primary and secondary buttons. We also added support for skiplinks.

What’s next?

If you are starting your website or wish to relaunch it with accessibility in mind, then migrating to our mossbo® Cloud product is the best option for you. You will benefit from our hard work in accessibility, because every new mossbo site automatically inherits the work to-date. Your website, based on mossbo, will not only fulfill accessibility, but it is also good for your SEO and good for getting your message across. Become a part of the mossbo® Cloud CMS Ecosystem and contact drunomics for a free offer today.