It’s nearly a year since the European Accessibility Act (EAA) was enacted. The act makes digital accessibility a strict legal mandate for any company trading within the EU. Aimed at breaking down fragmented regional barriers and creating an inclusive marketplace for people with disabilities and elderly citizens, the law targets core digital products and services, including e-commerce platforms, banking infrastructure, smartphones, and operating systems. While microenterprises with fewer than 10 employees and under €2 million in turnover receive exemptions from heavy documentation, all other global and local organisations must comply or face direct market exclusion.
Ignoring these harmonised standards exposes businesses and their leadership to severe legal and financial repercussions. Oversight bodies like Ireland’s Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (CCPC) are empowered to enforce substantial penalties that vary by member state. In Ireland, non-compliance can result in rolling daily fines of up to €1,000, civil litigation from advocacy groups, corporate fines of up to €60,000 on indictment, and personal criminal liability—including up to 18 months of imprisonment—for directors and managers who fail to meet the required WCAG standardisation.
Studies by Digital Business Ireland and Mason Hayes & Curran showed that nearly half of all surveyed organisations felt completely unready for the mandate, while over 90% of companies had zero budget allocated for accessibility compliance. This inertia was driven by massive technical hurdles, with 62% of businesses failing to conduct an initial accessibility audit, alongside a false sense of security stemming from the fact that only 32% of firms believed their own customers were even aware of the upcoming legal changes.
So, in the last year, I wanted to give some advice about how best to implement this and give some of the best examples of this as well.
Video Captions and Subtitles
Video content must be accessible without sound. Providing captions or subtitles is an essential equity standard so that all people who are deaf or hard of hearing can access the videos the same way that people without those conditions can. It also has the bonus of driving significant user engagement because the companies behind the social media algorithms can monetise this content and improve their service. It also has other benefits such as:
- A benchmark study by Preply highlighted that 30% of Irish residents use subtitles most of the time. This jumps to 57% among Gen Z viewers. Furthermore, 40% rely on subtitles to process unfamiliar accents, and 36% use them to combat loud background music.
- Data indicates that adding captions to your videos increases view time by 12% on Facebook. YouTube metrics demonstrate an even sharper lift: captioned videos experience 92% completion rates (compared to just 66% without), a 15% bump in engagement, and 27% more link clicks.
- Hosting a complete, text-based transcript on the same webpage increases keyword density, making your video highly discoverable for search engines. According to this article in 121captions.com “search engine algorithms cannot ‘watch’ videos, they rely on text to understand the content. Transcripts and captions provide keyword-rich text that search engines crawl and rank”
Some of the best examples of this are from the large broadcasters such as RTE Player and Virgin Media Player. Both Irish broadcasting platforms undertook extensive back-end overhauls to provide synchronised, accurate closed-captioning options across their native mobile apps and desktop players. Captions are cleanly rendered, properly timed, and scale accurately on mobile screens without overlapping key visual content.
However, without naming names, many smaller Irish companies use auto-generated social media captions on Instagram or TikTok without manual review. Auto-captions frequently misinterpret distinct regional Irish accents or specific local place names (e.g., misrendering Achill or Gweedore), resulting in garbled text that completely fails to convey the actual message to a deaf or hard-of-hearing viewer.
2. Descriptive Alternative text (alt-text)
2. Descriptive Alternative text (alt-text)
This is a critical HTML attribute that translates online visuals into spoken word or braille for screen-reader users, moving away from robotic lists of objects to convey the true context and editorial intent of an image. The scale of this digital deficit is immense: the global 2026 WebAIM Million Report reveals that 95.9% of the world’s top one million homepages have detectable WCAG failures, with 16.2% of all homepage images missing alternative text entirely and an additional 10.8% featuring repetitive or questionable text (such as alt=”image” or a raw file name).
While modern AI vision models can be leveraged to quickly draft these objective descriptions, manual human review remains essential to inject precise business branding, which simultaneously provides a vital text fallback for slow internet connections and acts as a major SEO catalyst for Google Image indexing.
- Write text that conveys the actual intent of the visual, rather than a robotic list of objects.
- If you are struggling with wording, routing your visual through an AI image generator can help draft a clear, objective summary of the scene.
- Beyond accessibility, alt-text serves as a fallback on slow network connections if the image takes a while to load and improves your overall visibility in Google Image search.
Major Irish brands demonstrate a sharp divide between proactive, inclusive infrastructure and legacy digital barriers ahead of full European Accessibility Act enforcement. On the winning side, Electric Ireland has built highly descriptive alt-text into its billing dashboards to summarise energy usage for screen-reader users, while Bank of Ireland has eliminated ambiguous “Click Here” links in favour of explicit, descriptive text. Similarly, Aer Lingus completely overhauled its booking framework, allowing visually impaired and motor-disabled passengers to navigate complex reservation paths, seat selections, and promotional offers using keyboard-only shortcuts.
Conversely, significant compliance gaps remain widespread across other domestic sectors. Grocery giant SuperValu published a transparent accessibility statement detailing their active remediation project, openly noting that parts of their legacy e-commerce site still suffer from missing navigation links, uncaptioned videos, and poor screen-reader support. Furthermore, digital news outlets frequently rely on unedited automated captions that misinterpret regional Irish accents, while boutique craft brands and hospitality websites routinely violate contrast laws by placing light grey text over white or busy backgrounds, legally blocking low-vision and elderly consumers.
3. Balanced Colour Contrast
3. Balanced Colour Contrast
To keep text legible for individuals with visual impairments or colour blindness, websites and documents must adhere to strict contrast standards.
- Maintain a minimum contrast ratio of 4.5:1 for standard body text.
- Avoid overlaying light text directly onto busy background images. Instead, place a solid, high-contrast block or an opaque overlay behind the wording.
- Ensure graphs and data visualisations use clear text labels or distinct patterns rather than relying strictly on colour variations. Avoid confusing pairings like red/green or blue/yellow.
The Best Examples
- An Post: Ireland’s national postal service heavily utilises a vibrant green brand identity. However, their digital portals are highly compliant. They restrict their signature green to large brand accents and logos, while executing all vital account text, tracking fields, and transaction buttons using deep black text against crisp, solid white backgrounds.
- Gov.ie: The consolidated Irish government portal is a gold standard in minimalist, high-contrast layout. It prioritises pure legibility by utilising stark white backgrounds paired with deep navy headings and black body text, eliminating decorative visual clutter.
The Worst Examples
- Irish Boutique Craft & Hospitality Websites: Independent Irish hotel websites, artisan gin distilleries, and high-end fashion labels frequently fall into the low-contrast trap. To look “sleek,” they often place thin, light-grey font styles onto stark white backgrounds, or overlay white cursive text directly onto bright photographs of landscapes or hotel rooms. This renders the text completely illegible to low-vision individuals, elderly users, or anyone using a mobile device outdoors.
- Legacy Corporate Report PDFs: Many Irish business networks publish annual financial reports or market infographics filled with complex multi-line charts that rely exclusively on varying shades of green, red, and orange to show corporate performance metrics. Without accompanying text labels or distinct line patterns, these charts are impossible for color-blind professionals to accurately interpret.
4. Plain English & Clean Copywriting
4. Plain English & Clean Copywriting
The structure of your writing directly dictates how well it functions with assistive technologies.
- Break up massive walls of text with scannable headings and bullet points.
The Rediscovery Centre - Avoid overusing ALL CAPS phrases. Screen readers often interpret them as individual acronyms (reading out single letters), and it can feel visually aggressive.
- Limit emojis to the end of sentences, and don’t stack them sequentially. A screen reader has to read out the exact alt-text string for every single emoji used.
The Best Examples
- An Post: Ireland’s national postal service heavily utilises a vibrant green brand identity. However, their digital portals are highly compliant. They restrict their signature green to large brand accents and logos, while executing all vital account text, tracking fields, and transaction buttons using deep black text against crisp, solid white backgrounds.
- Gov.ie: The consolidated Irish government portal is a gold standard in minimalist, high-contrast layout. It prioritises pure legibility by utilising stark white backgrounds paired with deep navy headings and black body text, eliminating decorative visual clutter.
The Worst Examples
- Irish Boutique Craft & Hospitality Websites: Independent Irish hotel websites, artisan gin distilleries, and high-end fashion labels frequently fall into the low-contrast trap. To look “sleek,” they often place thin, light-grey font styles onto stark white backgrounds, or overlay white cursive text directly onto bright photographs of landscapes or hotel rooms. This renders the text completely illegible to low-vision individuals, elderly users, or anyone using a mobile device outdoors.
- Legacy Corporate Report PDFs: Many Irish business networks publish annual financial reports or market infographics filled with complex multi-line charts that rely exclusively on varying shades of green, red, and orange to show corporate performance metrics. Without accompanying text labels or distinct line patterns, these charts are impossible for color-blind professionals to accurately interpret.
- Never use generic labels like “click here” or “read more”. Use specific descriptive phrases such as “sign up here” or “subscribe to our newsletter” so users navigating via links know exactly where they are going.
Vision Ireland
In the Irish marketplace, organisations can leverage localised expertise from premier specialists to secure their digital infrastructure. Trusting an experienced partner such as Vially (formerly IA Labs), Devally, a digital agency or All Human ensures that compliance gaps are accurately identified and remediated at the source code level. Proactively auditing your digital ecosystem ultimately serves as a powerful shield against steep financial penalties, individual consumer litigation, and market exclusion, while fundamentally ensuring that your commercial products remain open, fair, and accessible to all consumers.