Website Accessibility Compliance in Greece: What the European Accessibility Act Means for Your Business

If your business sells products or services to consumers in the EU, your website now falls under an accessibility law with real enforcement teeth. The European Accessibility Act (EAA) became enforceable across all 27 member states on 28 June 2025, and Greece transposed it into national law through Law 4994/2022. Since then, authorities can order non-compliant digital services off the market and impose fines that, for larger organizations, reach into the millions of euros.

What the European Accessibility Act requires

Your website, app, or online store has to be usable by people with disabilities, including those who navigate by keyboard only, rely on screen readers, or need higher contrast and resizable text to read comfortably.

The technical standard behind this is EN 301 549, which for web content maps directly onto WCAG 2.1 Level AA, the same guidelines accessibility professionals have used for years. In practice, that means:

• Every interactive element (menus, forms, buttons, filters) works without a mouse.
• Images carry meaningful alternative text. Filler like "image1.jpg" doesn't count.
• Colour contrast is strong enough to read text against its background.
• Text can be resized without breaking the layout.
• Forms show clear, understandable error messages instead of only a red border.
• Video content includes captions or a transcript.

You won't need to reinvent your site for any of this. Most of it comes down to how the site was built in the first place, which is why accessibility keeps turning up as a development problem as much as a design one.

Who has to comply with the European Accessibility Act

The EAA applies to businesses that sell products or provide services to consumers anywhere in the EU, regardless of where the company itself is registered. E-commerce, banking, transport booking, and any electronic service with a consumer-facing website are explicitly in scope.

Microenterprises, defined as businesses with fewer than 10 employees and under €2 million in annual turnover, are exempt from most EAA obligations. If you run a small local business with a simple brochure site and no online sales, you likely fall outside the strictest requirements. The moment you add e-commerce or online bookings, or grow past that threshold, the exemption stops applying.

What non-compliance costs

Under Greece's Law 4994/2022, competent authorities can issue withdrawal orders, publicly disclose non-compliance, and impose administrative sanctions, alongside the possibility of having a service suspended from the market. Other EU states have set their own penalty ranges, from up to €60,000 in Ireland to up to SEK 10 million (roughly €900,000) in Sweden, so the exposure varies by where you operate but is significant everywhere.

Within days of the June 2025 deadline, disability advocacy groups in France sent formal legal notices to major retailers, and by November 2025 they had taken four of those retailers to court in urgent summary proceedings. Regulators and advocacy organizations are actively looking, which moves the risk from "unlikely to be checked" to "already being checked."

The problem with accessibility overlay widgets

A lot of businesses have been sold a shortcut: install a JavaScript accessibility overlay widget, tick the box, move on. It is a common mistake. The European Disability Forum and the International Association of Accessibility Professionals have stated jointly that overlay widgets do not make a site compliant with European accessibility law. Automated scanners, including the tech behind most overlays, miss much of the problem: in a UK Government Digital Service test, individual tools found only between 17% and 41% of the barriers, and regulators and advocates increasingly read an overlay on a site as a sign that the underlying site was never properly fixed. Compliance comes from how the site is coded and structured, and a script added on top afterward can't change that.

What to check on your site first

You do not need a full audit to get a first read on where you stand. Start here:

1. Keyboard test. Unplug your mouse and try to complete your main conversion path (add to cart, submit a contact form, book an appointment) using only Tab, Shift+Tab, and Enter. If you get stuck, so will a portion of your visitors.
2. Screen reader pass. Turn on VoiceOver (Mac) or Narrator (Windows) and listen to your homepage. Does it make sense out loud, in order?
3. Contrast check. Run your main text and background colours through a free contrast checker. WCAG AA requires a 4.5:1 ratio for normal text.
4. Alt text audit. Check whether your product images, hero banners, and icons have real, descriptive alt attributes.
5. Automated scan, treated as a starting point. Automated tools are useful for catching obvious issues fast, but they surface only a fraction of what a manual review would find, so a clean scan is where the work starts.

If several of these fail on your current site, the fix probably belongs at the code and structure level, and a bolt-on tool won't cover it.

How we approach website accessibility at Ruler

When we build a custom website, we write clean code without a page builder, which gives us direct control over the markup that determines accessibility: semantic HTML, proper heading order, keyboard focus states, and alt text written as part of the content from the start. Accessible code and fast, well-structured code tend to be the same code. A site built to pass a Lighthouse audit and hold up in SEO and GEO work is, more often than not, already most of the way to WCAG AA, since AI engines and assistive technology both rely on clean semantic markup to understand a page. Once the foundation is solid, the remaining gap is usually smaller than businesses expect.

If you are evaluating a partner for a rebuild, ask directly whether accessibility is included by default or sold as a paid add-on you find out about later. The answer separates agencies that build accessible sites from ones that sell you an overlay widget afterward.

FAQ

Does the European Accessibility Act apply to my small business in Greece?

If you have fewer than 10 employees and under €2 million in annual turnover, you are likely exempt from most EAA obligations. Once you sell online, take bookings, or grow past that size, compliance applies.

Is WCAG 2.1 AA the same thing as the EAA?

Not exactly. The EAA is the law, and EN 301 549 is the technical standard it points to. For web content, that standard is built directly on WCAG 2.1 Level AA, so meeting WCAG AA is, in practice, how you meet the EAA's web requirements.

Will an accessibility overlay widget make my site compliant?

No. Overlay tools catch a fraction of real issues, and regulators and advocacy groups increasingly see them as a sign the underlying site was never fixed. Compliance needs to be built into the code.

How much of this can be fixed without a full rebuild?

It depends on how the current site was built. Sites on flexible, well-coded platforms can often close most gaps with targeted development work. Sites built on rigid page-builder templates tend to hit structural limits that only a rebuild resolves properly.

Where to start with accessibility compliance

The EAA is enforceable and already being enforced, and businesses that fix their sites now won't be waiting for a complaint to force the issue. Start with the manual checks above, keep in mind what an overlay widget can and cannot do, and plan the fix as part of how your site is built.