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Re: Who monitors and enforces EAA violations?

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From: Steve Green
Date: Apr 15, 2025 9:31AM

When countries enact the legislation, it will specify the monitoring and enforcement bodies. I don't expect that the bodies will be specified anywhere else unless one of us decides to do it (and I don't plan to). I don't even expect the EU to create a list of countries that have passed the legislation - they will just assume it has been done by the deadline.

The public sector equivalent of the EAA is the Web Accessibility Directive, and this certainly has teeth in the UK. When the WAD was transposed into UK law in 2018, the attitude towards accessibility changed almost overnight and the market for accessibility grew by several hundred percent. Seven years later, the law is still being taken just as seriously. I don't know if the same happened in other EU countries, but if it did, I would expect the EAA to be taken just as seriously.

I expect a few large countries in west Europe to enforce the EAA properly, such as Germany and Austria. The French will enforce it vigorously against non-French vendors, but not against French ones. The Mediterranean and eastern European countries will do little or nothing unless they need to protect a local vendor against external competition. You can never be too cynical when talking about the EU.

Steve Green
Managing Director
Test Partners Ltd