The European Accessibility Act (EAA), comes into full effect on June 28, 2025.
This marks a key moment for disability and age-inclusion across the EU, making it clearer for organisations what is expected of them and for consumers what is legally required to be provided to them. This Act builds on the 2016 Web Accessibility Directive requiring public sector websites and apps to meet global accessibility standards. The EAA now brings in commercial organisations ensuring many consumer-facing experiences are also accessible and inclusive to disabled and older individuals.
Open Inclusion have recently been asked by several research organisations and providers of technology to researchers what this means to our sector. What we have been sharing is our best current understanding as practitioners in this field, not lawyers! If you have any additional thoughts that could help progress these perspectives, please contact us and we are happy to add your thoughts and credit you for them.
If you are a research agency and you have clients based in the EU or are getting responses from participants in the EU, this new Act will impact you.
Although the EAA is primarily oriented to consumer-facing digital products and services such as e-commerce and banking, it is broadly applicable across many consumer industries and includes hardware, operating systems and software, kiosks such as ATMs and ticketing machines, television equipment and broadcast services, and passenger transport services.
Who is impacted in the research sector?
For those working in the research sector ESOMAR recently noted that the EAA will impact participant-facing research technology such as those who build, manage or use,
- Digital survey platforms
- Digital qualitative research engagement tools
- Digital panel recruitment and management platforms
If you are responsible for building research tech services either for use in house or to sell to clients based in the EU or where respondents may be from the EU, this includes you.
If you are using third party research tech tools with respondents based in the EU, you will need to ensure the tools you use comply with the Act, as respondents may hold you accountable for the backend tools you choose. Paid research is e-commerce.
If you are working with clients in the impacted sectors based in the EU or with EU based customers, they will rely on you meeting legal requirements to minimise their legal and reputational risks.
Impacted clients include any with products or services that include,
- e-commerce (online selling of products or services)
- computer or smartphone hardware and operating systems
- digital kiosks such as ATMs, ticketing or check in machines
- passenger transport services
- telephony and media equipment or services including broadcasting
- banking
- e-books
The EAA doesn’t apply to organisations with less than 10 staff or with a turnover under €2 million.
What are the benefits of compliance?
This Act is more than a regulatory hurdle to be met. It is a much needed opportunity to ensure more genuinely representative and inclusive insights.
Benefits of compliance include,
- More accurate insights
- More ethical research
- Market leadership and differentiation – available to first movers
- Protecting the value and reputation of the research sector
- Less legal, reputational or financial risk for your organisation (see next section)
Compliance with the Act will improve the ease of engaging in research for many participants with disabilities, age-related needs or other access challenges (permanent, situational or temporary) and therefore improve the representation, accuracy and value of the research we provide our clients.
Like GDPR progressed privacy, so the EAA will progress accessibility
Just as the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) did for improving privacy management across the sector, increasing standard practices, tools and as a result confidence in research and researchers, the EAA is likely to do for inclusive research. This Act will move inclusive research from a “nice to have” to a “must have” for many organisations.
Embracing these changes will improve the quality and value of research. If our tools work for a broader range of individuals, research agencies will not only ensure their compliance but also elevate the quality, integrity and societal impact of our work. More organisations will deliver inclusive insights, enabling our clients to make better decisions and design more broadly usable, desirable and valuable solutions.
There is an opportunity for leadership - it is now
As many organisations are still unaware or unsure how to take on this new legislative opportunity (or threat), the opportunity to lead is now. Organisations that get ‘ahead of the curve’ will find a market increasingly differentiated by accessibility.
How do we comply?
The EAA mandates that digital services, including many of the platforms and tools we use in market research, meet harmonised accessibility requirements.
Currently under EN 301 549, this means as a baseline digital content needs to adhere to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.1 Level AA) which has 50 success criteria. These ensure the content is,
- Perceivable: you know it is there
- Operable: you can navigate it
- Understandable: you know what it is saying
- Robust: it works across different platforms and assistive technologies
These criteria ensure that content works for people who rely on; assistive technologies like screen readers, keyboard only navigation, alternative formats such as captioned audio, ease of interaction such as consistent navigation, input error detection and suggestions, or sufficient colour contrast, to name a few.
Assessing research touchpoints
For research agencies, complying with the EAA translates to needing to critically evaluate the accessibility of each digital touchpoint along the research journey.
Consider the implications for your online survey platforms, participant recruitment portals, online focus group environments, and even the reporting dashboards you provide to clients.
Beyond the tools, we also need to consider the content creators. What skills, templates, guidelines or support do they have to build an accessible experience on the platforms you select?
While a survey platform itself might offer accessible features, the way it’s used can create barriers. For instance, selecting a specific question type that demands an interaction inaccessible to assistive technology users, embedding a video without captions, or opting for a color scheme with insufficient contrast can all render the final user experience inaccessible.
Participant accessibility is a combination of the accessibility of the underlying tool combined with how content is created on the tool.
If participants cannot easily log in, navigate survey questions, interact with multimedia stimuli, or access their incentives due to accessibility barriers, in addition to your data being skewed, after 28 June 2025, you will be in breach of the Act.
What are the implications of non-compliance?
Although the EAA requirements are EU-wide, each member state is publishing their related laws, regulations and penalties for non-compliance individually. Legal penalties range from fines, prison sentences to required withdrawal of a product from the market.
Some national examples include,
- Netherlands: Fines up to €103,000
- Germany: fines up to €10,000 for minor breaches or up to €100,000 for more severe offenses
- France: fines up to €7,500 for first time breaches or up to €15,000 for repeat offenders
- Ireland: Fines up to €5,000 or imprisonment up to 6 months or both for a summary conviction or fines up to €60,000 or imprisonment up to 18 months or both for a summary conviction
The responsibility for compliance is shared.
While third-party vendors providing survey software or panel management tools bear a significant burden of compliance, the onus is equally on agencies or in-house teams using these tools to ensure that their chosen partners are accessible. Building EAA compliant accessibility requirements into vendor contracts and actively collaborating to ensure alignment across the entire research experience will be required.
Participants may not differentiate between your agency and your technology providers – their experience is simply your experience.
Beyond the legal imperative and risk of penalties, EAA breaches may significantly impact brand reputation, trust and goodwill.
Got it! So what do we do to get ready?
The 28th June 2025 is coming up fast! A good Chinese proverb comes to mind,
“The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The second best time is today.”
We would suggest acting now to both protect and strengthen your research business. Here are some areas where you could start or progress your readiness for the EAA,
- Engage your legal team: Check how they are preparing your organisation for the EAA.
- Engage your procurement team: Assess accessibility as part of your third-party procurement process. Build EAA risk and quality impact of accessibility into your purchasing decisions.
- Engage your suppliers: Check suppliers’ accessibility statements, ask them about their most recent audit, any known issues and their roadmap to improve the accessibility of their tool or service. Check for guidance they may provide on using their solutions accessibly.
- Audit your research tools: From recruitment to reporting, identify, understand and address accessibility barriers that emerge between the tools you use (in-house or third party) and how you use them.
- Engage disabled users: Conduct user testing with people with a range of authentic lived experiences of disability to identify real-world barriers within your key research journeys.
- Plan your progress: Prioritise and plan the approach to address residual barriers. Work with experts to support the efficient development and delivery of this plan and interim alternatives.
- Embed inclusion into your workflow: Create training, guidelines and inclusive practices for your research, research ops, tech and procurement teams. Build accessibility testing (audits and authentic users) into your ongoing processes. Bake accessibility into the DNA of your organisation, efficiently fulfilling legal requirements while delivering more inclusive, accurate and valuable insights.
- Tell your clients and potential clients: Differentiate your services based on the work that you have done to ensure that relevant participants for the research, including those with disabilities, can equally be involved, remunerated and included in the insights you deliver. You are not just meeting your EAA obligations, but helping your clients meet theirs also.
The European Accessibility Act is more than just a directive or a legal and reputational liability to be managed. It is a catalyst for positive change to the research sector.
From this June the EAA will help create a more equitable, insightful, responsible and ultimately, valuable market research sector, starting with those working in or with client or participants in the EU, and likely extending well beyond it in the future.
If you would like to know more about how you can prepare your research business for the EAA, please contact us at [email protected].
We can help,
- train teams in accessible research practices
- assess research tools with authentic usability testing of them
- help you consider and understand accessibility limitations in the tools or practices you use in your research to prioritise deeper assessments and learning.
I'm curious to know more...
Here are a few articles and links that may help those who are curious to know more.
- European Accessibility Act, European Commission
- The European Accessibility Act and What It Means For Research. Jules van Vlokhoven (ESOMAR)
- The Hidden Cost of European Accessibility Act Non-Compliance, Cactus Communications
- Are you Ready for the European Accessibility Act?, AbilityNet
- What is the European Accessibility Act? Deque
- European Accessibility Act Implemented into Irish Law, Mason Hayes & Curran