The European Accessibility Act: How marketers can respond

Since the earliest days of digital marketing, accessibility best practices have been developed to help businesses improve their online experiences for all users—including the more than 1.3 billion people worldwide with disabilities (or about 16% of the world’s population), whose spending power is estimated to add up to $7 trillion.

The European Accessibility Act (EAA) is a new European Union (EU) accessibility directive that goes into effect June 28, 2025. The EAA is intended to raise the bar for accessibility when it comes to products and services—including electronic content, electronic communications services, audiovisual media services, and websites and mobile device-based services including mobile applications — for people living in the EU, where 25% of the population ages 16 and up (about 101 million people) have a disability.

What is the European Accessibility Act, and why does it matter?

The European Accessibility Act is legislation that’s designed to create uniform accessibility standards across member EU nations. As part of these new requirements, brands must adhere to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 Level AA standards and ensure their electronic content, websites, apps, and other digital experiences are:

• Perceivable: Presented in ways that users can perceive, regardless of their abilities
• Operable: Users should not be expected to complete functions that they are not able to perform
• Understandable: Includes clear and simple language and layouts and structures that follow logical reading patterns
• Robust: Users must be able to access the content with assistive technologies, if needed

Even companies based in other parts of the world will be required to be in compliance if they have apps, websites, and other digital content, communications, and experiences that are available in the EU. And while brands are currently required to follow 2.1 Level AA standards at a minimum, marketers can get ahead of potential future expectations by considering implementing WCAG 2.2 best practices as well.

Every marketing interaction—from app sessions and website visits to email opens and push notification clicks—is an opportunity for brands to create deeper relationships with their customers across their customer lifecycles. When brands fail to create inclusive digital apps, websites, messages, and other experiences, they miss out on those opportunities to acquire and retain potential customers. And that has real financial costs, too—estimates range from

hundreds of millions to billions, annually, due to issues like legal expenses, lower conversion rates, lost revenue and market reach, and tarnished brand reputations.

Digital marketing accessibility best practices

We’ve rounded up a list of steps you can take to help make it easier for your audience to engage with your messaging and make your content, campaigns, and experiences as accessible as possible for the global community of people with disabilities. The following marketing accessibility tips are inspired by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)’s recommendations included in the W3C: Diverse Abilities and Barriers and Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.

Content

• Keep your content on brand, but use plain language.
• Structure your content logically, and make sure headings follow the correct hierarchy. Don’t skip heading levels.
• Avoid center-aligned text for long chunks of content, as this can be difficult for users with cognitive or learning disabilities to read.
• Use sans-serif fonts, which are easier to read on digital devices.
• Always test your copy by sending a test message to a device to make sure your text isn’t truncated.

Links

• Write link text that clearly describes where the link will take the user; screen reader users often skip from link to link as a way of skimming through content, so make sure your link text can stand on its own.
• Avoid phrases like “click here,” “more,” and “click for details,” as they are ambiguous when read out of context. Instead, clearly describe the action that will happen when a user clicks the link or button (e.g. “Click here for the full story” or “Read the full story here.”).

Buttons

• Use buttons for clickable actions, such as sending a form or playing a carousel.
• Test to ensure your button text isn’t too long. If the button can’t display all of the text, it will truncate with an ellipsis as opposed to the text wrapping to a new line.

Images and alt text

• For every image, write alternative text that provides the information or function of the image.
• Don’t use the word “picture” or “image” in your alt text.
• Avoid using images of text, as screen readers can’t read text that’s contained inside an image.

Videos

• Provide closed captions for videos to help people with vision loss, those watching in a noisy place, and those who speak a different language than the language in the video.

Color contrast

• Having sufficient color contrast can be a quick win for accessibility. The contrast ratio between foreground (text) and background colors should follow a contrast ratio of 4.5:1 for normal text (think body text, buttons, and links) and 3:1 for large text (think headers).

Forms

• To reduce cognitive load, break long forms into smaller sections. This is known as chunking, a progressive disclosure pattern used to make the information easier to consume. This benefits all users but is especially helpful for people with cognitive disabilities.
• Don’t prevent certain character types from being input in form fields. It’s better to allow users to enter whatever they want and then provide an error message as to what’s wrong. Blocking keyboard input poses a particular problem for assistive technology users, as they rely heavily on inline validation to determine if they’ve filled in the form correctly.
• Write clear error messages that include what’s happened, what went wrong, and how they can fix it.

Test your email accessibility with Braze Inbox Vision

To help you audit and review your emails for accessibility, we’re rolling out new capabilities to the Braze platform’s email preview tool Inbox Vision ahead of the June 28 EAA date. This solution allows teams to test and view emails from the perspective of various types of email clients and devices—all in one central location within the Braze platform, without having to send test emails—to ensure campaigns are rendering as desired for customers.

We’re expanding Inbox Vision to include a new accessibility testing tab that will automatically review your emails against specific accessibility criteria, including some of the standards included in W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. For instance, Inbox Vision can check whether:

• Your content has a title attribute.
• Your images contain alt text descriptions.
• There’s sufficient color contrast between foreground text and background colors.
• Your link has discernible text and is easily visible.
• …and more.

These updates are designed to remove some of the manual effort involved in reviewing email campaigns to make sure they’re following accessibility best practices. By being able to see at a glance whether your campaigns are meeting select guidelines (or not), Inbox Vision’s automated tests makes it faster to scale your email accessibility efforts.

Scan your in-app messages for accessibility best practices

Ahead of the June rollout of the EAA, we’re also planning to release a new capability in the Braze platform’s HTML in-app message composer. Within the editor, Braze will automatically scan your in-app message content and flag common accessibility concerns—such as missing alt text, low color contrast, or improper heading structure—so you can fix them early in your workflow. By catching issues before launch, you’ll ensure a more inclusive experience for every recipient.

This is just the beginning. We’re actively working to expand these proactive accessibility checks across other message editors in Braze throughout the year, because designing with empathy and inclusivity in mind shouldn’t be an afterthought.

Final thoughts

Making your digital marketing more accessible for as many of your users as possible isn’t just the right thing to do, it’s also what makes the most sense for brands looking to grow their businesses, strengthen their relationships with customers, and bolster their brand reputations.

Ready to take your accessibility efforts to the next level ahead of the roll out of EAA? Be sure to check out the new Braze Accessible Messaging Foundations course (available for current Braze users) and our guidelines for creating more accessible marketing messages.