If your product reaches users in Europe or the United States, two laws come up in most accessibility conversations: the European Accessibility Act (EAA) and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).
This page is a plain-language primer, not legal advice. Whether either law applies to your product, and what it requires of you, depends on your product, your users, and your jurisdiction. Those are questions for your counsel, not for a monitoring tool.
The short version
- The EAA sets accessibility requirements for many digital products and services sold in the EU, with obligations that began applying in 2025. The European standard it points to (EN 301 549) references WCAG for web content.
- The ADA has been applied in many US cases and settlements to the websites and apps of businesses open to the public. WCAG is the reference point most of that activity converges on.
The details (which products, which deadlines, which exemptions) vary by country, sector, and company size. Do not take a summary’s word for it, including this one.
The question that actually reaches engineering
In practice, the accessibility question rarely arrives as a statute citation. It arrives as a customer’s procurement questionnaire, a security-review-style checklist, or a request from your own counsel, and the useful form of it is usually: what does your team do about accessibility, on an ongoing basis?
A one-time audit is a snapshot that starts aging at your next deploy. What holds up better is a running record:
- what you monitor,
- what you have fixed,
- and what is still open.
If your product is a year past its last audit and a questionnaire asks how you handle accessibility today, that record is the difference between answering from evidence and answering from memory.
How AccessLint fits, and where it stops
AccessLint monitors real user journeys on your live site and keeps that running record: a violation trend over time, a reviewable ledger of known issues, and a read-only report you can share. It can help you show that accessibility is part of how your team works.
Be clear-eyed about the limits:
- No tool can make you compliant. Compliance is a legal determination, not a scan result.
- A report is not a certification. AccessLint’s findings are evidence of monitoring, not a conformance claim against WCAG or any law.
- Automated checks find a subset of issues. They cannot judge keyboard flows, focus order, alt-text quality, or whether content makes sense to a screen reader user. A clean run is a good signal, not a verdict.
- Formal conformance work needs people. If you need an audit, a conformance statement, or an accessibility statement for a regulator, involve a human expert review.
Read more about production monitoring or what automated checks cover.