EAA compliance for SaaS: when it applies, and when it does not

What the Act actually covers

The European Accessibility Act does not cover software in general. It covers a list of services provided to consumers: e-commerce, consumer banking, electronic communications, access to audiovisual media services, elements of passenger transport services, and e-books with the software used to read them. A consumer, in the Act’s terms, is a person acting outside their trade or profession. The duties fall on the organisation that provides the service to those consumers.

That gives a SaaS company three routes into the Act, and one way out.

1. You sell to consumers online. If people can buy your product or subscribe to it through your website or app, that selling process is an e-commerce service, and the journey from landing page to payment is in scope. This is the route most B2C and “prosumer” SaaS companies are on without realising it.

2. Your product is how a client delivers an in-scope service. A bank’s account opening built on your platform, a retailer’s checkout, an airline’s booking flow, a streaming service’s player: the client is the service provider and carries the duty, but what its customers use is your interface. Expect the requirement to arrive through contracts, procurement questionnaires and audits rather than from a regulator. Your client cannot meet its obligation if your component does not.

3. Your product is one of the listed services. An e-reader app, a consumer payments product, a messaging service: then you are the service provider, and the duties are yours directly.

The way out: a tool used only by businesses and their staff. A workforce scheduling system, an internal analytics dashboard or a back-office tool used by employees is not provided to consumers, so the EAA does not reach it. Other obligations may. Public-sector buyers have their own accessibility rules, and EN 301 549 is widely used in procurement.

Microenterprises providing services are exempt from the Act’s accessibility requirements and the obligations that go with them (Article 4(5)).

The question to ask is not only “who is our customer?” It is “which of these routes are we on, and for which parts of the product?”

Why governance is harder in SaaS than e-commerce

An e-commerce site changes its interface in discrete releases. A SaaS platform ships continuously. Feature velocity that is a competitive advantage in product development becomes a compliance liability without a governance process attached to it. Every sprint is an opportunity for a new accessibility barrier to enter production, and without a review step, none of them get caught before they ship.

This is compounded by AI-assisted development. The AIMAC benchmark found that most AI coding models produce non-compliant HTML by default. Accessibility hasn’t been a primary training objective for any major model tested. A SaaS team using AI tools to accelerate feature development is very likely accelerating the accumulation of accessibility debt at the same time, unless an explicit review step is built into the release process.

The technical fix for a single barrier is usually straightforward. The governance failure that let it ship unreviewed, and will let the next one ship the same way, is the actual risk.

The four areas of work in a SaaS context

• Technical conformance: where the product is in scope, that means the interface people actually use, not just marketing pages. In practice the benchmark is EN 301 549 V3.2.1 and WCAG 2.1 AA.
• Published accessibility information: current, and covering the in-scope service itself, not just the public-facing website. On route 2, your client will usually need this from you to write its own.
• Active governance: the area that matters most for SaaS specifically. An accessibility review step in the release pipeline, not a one-off audit disconnected from ongoing development.
• Documentary evidence: a dated record that accessibility review is genuinely happening release over release, not a single certificate from a year ago.

Market by market

Not certain the Act reaches you at all? Five questions will tell you, including what the microenterprise exemption actually says, which is commonly stated wrongly.