Accessibility laws marketers should know: ADA, WCAG, and the EAA in plain English

A demand letter lands in the inbox citing the ADA. Or legal forwards a one-line question: "Does the EAA apply to us?" Neither is hypothetical anymore — accessibility lawsuits and enforcement actions have moved from a niche legal-team concern to something marketing gets pulled into directly, usually because marketing is the team touching the website and the social content those letters are about.

Three acronyms come up constantly: ADA, WCAG, and EAA. They're not interchangeable, and knowing the difference matters more than it sounds.

ADA: two different tracks

The Americans with Disabilities Act splits into titles that apply to different kinds of organizations. Title II covers state and local government entities — cities, public universities, transit agencies. In 2024 the Department of Justice finalized a rule requiring these entities to meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA, with compliance deadlines that have since been extended into 2027 and 2028 depending on the size of the entity.

Title III covers private businesses — where most marketing teams actually live. There's no equivalent DOJ regulation spelling out a technical standard for Title III yet. Instead, the standard has been set by precedent: courts hearing ADA lawsuits against businesses consistently point to WCAG 2.1 AA as the benchmark, even without a rule requiring it by name. In practice, "we're a private company, so the rule doesn't apply to us" isn't the protection it sounds like — the exposure comes from lawsuits, not a missing regulation.

WCAG: the standard everyone points to

WCAG is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, and it isn't a law — it's the technical spec that laws and lawsuits borrow. "Level AA" is the middle tier of three (A, AA, AAA), and it's the one nearly every regulation and settlement references. Alt text on images is one of dozens of WCAG success criteria, but it's one of the most visible and most frequently cited in complaints, because it's easy for an auditor — or a plaintiff's lawyer — to check in seconds.

The EAA: Europe's version, already in force

The European Accessibility Act has been enforceable since June 28, 2025, and it applies to any business selling digital products or services to consumers in the EU — regardless of where the company is headquartered. A store shipping to Germany or France can fall under it whether or not the business has an EU office. It leans on the same technical baseline, WCAG 2.1 AA, through a European standard called EN 301 549. Services already on the market before the deadline get a transition period out to 2030, but anything launched after June 2025 needs to comply now. Enforcement varies by country, but the first lawsuits under the EAA were filed in late 2025, and penalties in some member states can reach a meaningful share of annual revenue.

Where this actually lands on your desk

None of this requires becoming a compliance expert. The practical throughline across all three is the same: WCAG 2.1 AA, applied consistently, is the standard that satisfies the government rule, the court precedent, and the EU law at once. For marketing teams, that mostly shows up as a handful of habits — alt text on every published image, captions on video, enough color contrast to read text against a background, and forms that work with a keyboard alone.

This isn't legal advice, and a real compliance question — an actual demand letter, a specific contract clause — belongs with a lawyer who knows your business. But the baseline habits are cheap, and they're the same habits whether the letter comes from a US plaintiff's firm or an EU regulator.