Jurisdictions — Europe
EAA compliance audit for agencies: what you actually need to check on client sites
The question agencies are asking
You manage five, twenty, fifty client websites. A client emails: "Do we need to worry about the European Accessibility Act?" What does an honest answer look like — and what should an audit actually cover?
What's actually true right now
Three facts matter, and all three are verifiable:
- The EAA is enforceable, not pending. It has applied to in-scope products and services since June 28, 2025. This is no longer a "get ready" regulation.
- Enforcement has started in France. In November 2025 — per contemporaneous press reporting — French organizations filed injunctions against Auchan, Carrefour, and E.Leclerc at the Tribunal judiciaire de Paris. Large retailers were the first targets, but the mechanism — accessibility litigation against live websites — is now demonstrated in an EU jurisdiction. France also has its own reference framework, the RGAA, which is what French audits are measured against.
- The US picture is parallel, not hypothetical. UsableNet's year-end report counted 4,928 web accessibility lawsuits across US federal and NY/CA state courts in 2025. If your agency serves clients on both sides of the Atlantic, the exposure is on both sides too.
One more fact agencies should know before reaching for a quick fix: accessibility overlay widgets are not a safe harbor. accessiBe, the best-known overlay vendor, is under a $1M FTC order — public record. A widget that claims to fix compliance attracted a regulator's penalty for how those claims were made. Whatever your audit recommends, it should recommend fixing the actual pages.
How to check a client site yourself
You don't need an enterprise contract to do a first pass:
- Accessibility signals: run an automated WCAG checker (axe-core is the open-source standard) on the key templates — home, product/service page, contact form. Automated checks won't catch everything, but they catch the mechanical failures that show up first in complaints: missing alt text, unlabeled form fields, contrast failures.
- Consent posture: load the site fresh and watch what fires before any consent is given. Check whether a consent mechanism exists at all and whether it's honestly presented.
- Broken links and SEO basics: crawl for 404s, missing titles, missing meta descriptions. Not a legal issue — but if you're auditing anyway, one pass should cover the basics a client will also ask about.
- Document what you saw. The single most important habit: capture the page state behind every finding. An audit that can't show its evidence is an opinion.
Repeat that across a portfolio, and you'll understand why agencies either skip it or pay monitoring-subscription prices (at their published prices when we last checked, indie accessibility monitors run $19–159/mo, enterprise platforms like Siteimprove start above $12k/yr, and France's RGAA Checker runs 69–249€/mo — verify current pricing before quoting it).
The honest shortcut
We built SiteComply to do exactly the pass above — accessibility signals, consent posture, broken links, SEO basics — as a one-shot $29 audit where every finding links to the exact page state we observed. It's white-label-friendly, built for agency portfolios, and it never claims more than it checked.