2026.08.1
CurrentDrafted against the law as it stood on 24 August 2026First edition. Written from the Directive and from nine national transpositions, against a popular account of this law that is wrong in three places that matter to a small company.
- No harmonised standard has been cited in the Official Journal for Directive (EU) 2019/882, so the presumption of conformity in Article 15 is not available. EN 301 549 v3.2.1 is harmonised under Directive (EU) 2016/2102, which binds public sector bodies and is a different instrument. Conforming to it remains the right engineering target and strong evidence, but the drafting works from Annex I directly rather than claiming a presumption that has never existed.
- Penalties are national. Article 30 sets no European ceiling, and the verified spread across the nine markets covered runs from EUR 7,500 in France to EUR 900,000 or one per cent of turnover in the Netherlands. The figure of EUR 25,000 widely quoted for a missing French accessibility statement belongs to Loi 2005-102, a separate and older regime, not to the transposition of this Directive.
- The microenterprise exemption in Article 4(5) covers services only. A company under ten staff and two million in turnover is exempt from the service requirements, but not where it manufactures, imports or distributes a covered product, not where national law is stricter, and not from the day it takes on a tenth employee, since the Directive provides no grace period on crossing the threshold.
- Enforcement to date has come from disability associations litigating rather than from regulators fining. No administrative fine under any national transposition could be found from a primary source. The French courts have ruled twice: Carrefour was ordered to remediate within six months with a EUR 500 daily penalty, and Auchan escaped on a threshold question that leaves genuine uncertainty about which regime governs in France.
- Checked and found already correct in the popular account: the 28 June 2025 application date, the transitional periods in Article 32, and the scope of e-commerce as a covered service.