Notes from an AMS UX Research meetup with a panel of accessibility practitioners from travel tech, banking and consulting.
The European Accessibility Act (EAA)
- Adopted in 2019, it applies from June 2025. The goal is to make products and services equally accessible across the EU.
- It covers a wide range: e-commerce, banking, payment terminals, devices, transport services and more. It works almost as a catch-all.
- Micro-enterprises (fewer than 10 employees and no more than €2 million in turnover) are exempt for services.
- It’s about human rights: making things work for everyone, as more of life becomes digital.
What counts as a disability?
Cognitive, physical, social and economic, and temporary or situational. We are all only temporarily able.
The biggest challenges
- Understanding and education, across the whole company.
- Reaching people with disabilities for research. One bank has built a panel of nearly 1,000 disabled people to research with.
- Stakeholder buy-in, and the time that regular research takes.
- Keeping it up: an audit needs to happen after every change.
- Call centers are among the most expensive channels, so accessible self-service also pays off.
What moves things forward
- Invite people with disabilities into every part of your process, and hire them.
- Build empathy with the people you design for, and make the work easy and fun.
- Put accessibility in the strategy, with clear roles such as an accessibility officer.
- Connect it to wider reporting like CSRD.
- Lean on intrinsic motivation rather than fear of the law.
One takeaway
Conformance is not the same as experience. Accessibility is a state and a practice. You are not your customer: put yourself in the shoes of your 85-year-old neighbor, and start your own circle of participants to test with.
Resources I shared at the meetup
Related: Accessibility and inclusion · EU AI Act