As from 28 June 2025 the EU Access­ib­il­ity Act (EU Dir­ect­ive 2019/882) applies in the Neth­er­lands. The pur­pose of this Act is to increase the avail­ab­il­ity of access­ible products and ser­vices and to improve the access­ib­il­ity of rel­ev­ant inform­a­tion for cus­tom­ers in the EU. Many com­pan­ies are affected by this Act.

What products and ser­vices?

The fol­low­ing products and ser­vices for con­sumers are in scope:

Products

• Com­puters and oper­at­ing sys­tems
• Smart­phones and oth­er com­mu­nic­a­tion devices
• TV equip­ment related to digit­al tele­vi­sion ser­vices
• ATMs and pay­ment ter­min­als (e.g., card pay­ment machines in super­mar­kets)
• E-read­ers
• Tick­et­ing and check-in machines

Ser­vices

• Phone ser­vices and related equip­ment
• Bank­ing ser­vices
• E-com­merce
• Web­sites, mobile ser­vices, elec­tron­ic tick­ets and all sources of inform­a­tion for air, bus, rail and water­borne trans­port ser­vices
• E-books
• Access to Audio-visu­al media ser­vices such as tele­vi­sion broad­cast and related equip­ment
• Calls to the European emer­gency num­ber 112

Require­ment
In gen­er­al, all these products and ser­vices must be made (tech­nic­ally) access­ible for dis­abled people. In prac­tice this means that you should ana­lyse if your product or ser­vice falls with­in the scope. And if so, check if it is access­ible enough. If it is not, amend­ments should be made to cre­ate bet­ter access­ib­il­ity. For instance, instruc­tion videos should be sub­titled or text on a web­site should be avail­able in an audit­ive man­ner.

Fur­ter, the com­pany should devel­op a gov­ernance and policy frame­work to cater for the required access­ib­il­ity checks and require­ments, or an exist­ing frame­work should be amended. Also, your state­ment of imple­ment­a­tion of the access­ib­il­ity require­ments should be pub­licly avail­able and staff must be trained to use and refer to access­ible products and ser­vices.

How we can assist
HVG Law has a stra­tegic alli­ance with EY Tax and is part of the EY Law net­work. Togeth­er with the con­sult­ants of EY (VODW) Martha Kuijpers and Robbert van Leeuwen we can provide aware­ness train­ings, a gap ana­lys­is, a gov­ernance and policy frame­work, a tech­nic­al imple­ment­a­tion pro­cess and staff train­ing.

We believe in an integ­rated imple­ment­a­tion pro­cess that takes all the above require­ments into account, but where our start­ing point is the optim­al cus­tom­er exper­i­ence. We would be happy to tell you about our approach.

Inter­ested? Please con­tact Joost Elsen­burg or Mer­i­en Voorboom.