What if a new EU law turned your highest-earning digital service into a compliance landmine overnight? That’s the reality looming for teams in banking, healthtech, insurance, and medtech as the European Accessibility Act (EAA) approaches.
In regulated sectors, compliance has never been optional, but the EAA introduces a deeper layer of accountability that reaches into every keystroke of your development and testing workflow.
Unlike earlier accessibility laws that focused mostly on public-sector websites, the EAA covers a far broader scope of digital services, including mobile applications, payment services, self-service terminals, training services, and audio visual media services.
Whether you’re launching a new insurance portal or updating a banking app, the bar for accessibility compliance is about to rise dramatically. And if your testing practice isn’t ready, even a minor UI glitch could escalate into non-compliance, fines, or market exclusion.
This isn’t just an issue for designers and legal teams. If your team is responsible for the quality of user interfaces, web accessibility, or functional performance, you’re in it too. Especially in industries where a single oversight could lead to non-compliance, fines, or market exclusion.
What Is the European Accessibility Act?
The European Accessibility Act (EAA) is an EU directive aimed at harmonizing accessibility requirements for key services and consumer electronics across the internal market. It ensures that people with disabilities can access digital services and related consumer equipment services without facing unnecessary barriers. The EAA goes into effect on June 28, 2025, and applies across all EU member states.
The EAA sets out rules based on Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.1 Level AA) and applies to a wide array of products and services, including:
- Banking services and payment terminals
- Mobile apps, operating systems, and TV equipment
- Audiovisual media services and television broadcast platforms
- Public services, training services, and call centres
- Ticketing machines, ATMs, and other self-service terminals
- Support services, relay services, and personal devices
It requires economic operators and service providers to ensure that their offerings work with assistive technologies like screen readers, provide audio descriptions, and are operable using accessible navigation mechanisms.
Importantly, enforcement is decentralized. Each country must implement the EAA into national law, monitored by market surveillance authorities. This ensures that the same eaa compliance standards apply across the EU countries, reducing confusion from diverging accessibility requirements.
Accessibility compliance isn’t just about testing accessibility
Let’s set expectations early:
TestResults does not offer accessibility testing or accessibility audits. We don’t evaluate screen readers, color contrast, or WCAG compliance. But we do help regulated industries build reliable, traceable, and testable systems that support compliance workflows.
Many organizations wrongly assume that accessibility compliance is handled solely through a final audit. But in practice, it involves the full software development lifecycle, including testing. Even small functional issues can turn into accessibility blockers. If a button is unreachable via keyboard, or a modal steals focus, that’s no longer just a usability issue, it’s a potential compliance failure.
That’s why your test strategy needs to account for changes introduced by EAA regulations. From preventing regressions to supporting clear traceability, QA teams are central to helping ensure accessibility, even without performing dedicated accessibility tests.
How testing teams in regulated industries should adapt
Adapting your software testing strategy to align with the European Accessibility Act doesn’t require an overhaul, but it does require intentional updates. In regulated industries like finance, insurance, and healthcare, QA teams must evolve their testing processes to account for accessibility-sensitive flows, even if they’re not performing full accessibility checks.
Here are three strategic steps testing teams should take to support EAA readiness:
1. Align testing with European Accessibility Compliance Goals
As a service provider in finance, health, or another regulated sector, you’re likely delivering accessible products and services under legal frameworks shaped by the European Accessibility Act. Your testing now plays a supporting role in meeting those expectations.
- Map test cases to accessibility-related functional requirements: Accessibility isn't a separate testing domain, it lives in existing functionality like login flows, navigation, and form handling.
- Validate across environments: Consistency matters. An app that works on desktop but fails on mobile violates EAA compliance expectations.
- **Enable traceable documentation: **Compliance isn’t just about what you test, it’s about proving you tested it. A traceable link between requirements and test results is essential.
PRO TIP:
TestResults supports this effort by providing a codeless platform that lets QA teams automate these flows without writing custom scripts: reducing risk, improving transparency, and saving time.
2. Expand regression testing to cover accessibility-sensitive features
While accessibility testing includes tasks like checking screen reader support and color contrast, there’s a layer of functional support that QA teams can (and should) own. Functional errors can easily turn into accessibility blockers.
- Tab order and workflow consistency: Ensure that users can navigate forms, menus, and onboarding sequences with a keyboard or assistive device.
- Stable focus behavior: Modals, dropdowns, and pop-ups must return focus to the correct field when dismissed. If not, users may get stuck.
- Reliable form validation: Clear, visible error messaging helps users recover from mistakes. It also prevents forms from appearing broken.
- Cross-device continuity: Functional consistency across mobile applications, operating systems, and digital interfaces ensures your service remains accessible on any platform.
PRO TIP:
With TestResults, you can automate regression tests that simulate real user behavior, validate visual feedback, and document any unexpected screen changes that could undermine accessibility indirectly.
3. Support documentation and audit readiness
Under the EAA, it’s not enough to be compliant, you need to show that you are. That means testing documentation needs to align with national law, market surveillance authorities, and internal legal teams.
- Link test coverage to compliance-relevant features: Ensure your most critical user flows are covered by automated tests and clearly referenced in requirement documentation.
- Log accessibility-relevant test activity: Even if you’re not testing accessibility directly, your test data should reflect the stability and reliability of accessibility-critical features.
- Export proof for audits: Whether for internal QA reviews or formal inspections, make sure logs, screenshots, and execution timelines are exportable and clear.
PRO TIP:
TestResults makes this easier by automatically generating test artifacts and linking them to functional specs, which helps legal and engineering teams collaborate more effectively during audits.
Testing support is a pillar of EAA compliance
Accessibility compliance isn’t a one‑off audit; it’s an ongoing engineering practice. For regulated sectors working under the European Accessibility Act, testing provides the safety net that keeps digital experiences usable and compliant, even as code changes daily and new features roll out.
Below are five concrete ways your QA practice underpins EAA success:
Baseline coverage for critical flows
Map tests to every user journey that, if broken, would block access for people using assistive technologies (e.g., screen readers or switch devices). Think login, payment confirmation, and account recovery in banking services.
Proactive regression detection in CI/CD
Integrate UI tests into your continuous‑integration pipeline so defects are caught before they hit production.
For example, you can use TestResults’ parallel execution to run checks on multiple operating systems, browsers, and mobile applications, satisfying the EAA requirement to support a broad slice of the internal market.
Release gates tied to compliance KPIs
Establish automated pass/fail criteria that block deployment if a change breaks an accessibility‑sensitive step (e.g., keyboard focus, ARIA landmark visibility). This approach keeps you on the good side of market surveillance authorities and respective national law without slowing release velocity.
Living documentation for audits
Every automated run in TestResults produces timestamped logs, screenshots, and linked requirements. These artifacts form a defensible audit trail that demonstrates ongoing due diligence to regulators and shows you’re prepared for inspections related to non‑compliance.
Cross‑functional collaboration & knowledge sharing
Testing data isn’t just for QA. Share failing scenarios with designers and accessibility experts so root causes are fixed at the source. Over time, this feedback loop raises the quality bar for new features, reduces rework, and helps teams consistently ensure accessibility across products and services.
Quick Win: Add an accessibility‑impact tag (e.g., eaa‑critical) to test cases that cover navigation, input, and visible feedback. This makes it easy for product managers and compliance leads to pull reports on high‑risk areas at any time.
Common accessibility-related scenarios test teams can catch
Automation can't replace a full accessibility audit, but it plays a major role in catching functional regressions that could result in EAA non-compliance.
Here are a few examples of accessibility-impacting bugs that testing teams can proactively identify:
1. A CTA button that vanishes in mobile view
If a primary call-to-action disappears on smaller screens, users relying on mobile apps or personal devices are left with no clear next step. This issue especially impacts banking services, where a missing "Submit" or "Pay" button could stop a transaction.
While not a WCAG violation on its own, this leads to accessibility issues that undermine user experience and functionality.
2. Focus failing to return after a pop-up closes
Imagine a user on a self-service terminal closing a modal window, only to find their focus lost in the DOM. For users relying on screen readers or keyboard navigation, this breaks the experience entirely.
This problem violates accessibility standards related to focus management and disrupts relay services and support services that depend on sequential workflows.
3. Broken form error messages on incorrect input
If an input field triggers an error but doesn’t present it clearly, users with cognitive or visual impairments may not realize what’s wrong. This also impacts training services, public services, and digital accessibility for older adults.
Ensuring that error messages are programmatically linked to form fields is essential for web accessibility and assistive technologies.
4. Scroll locking that prevents keyboard-only navigation
In some apps, opening a modal causes the background page to scroll-lock or trap focus incorrectly. Users who rely solely on a keyboard can get stuck, unable to reach navigation or close the dialog.
This creates accessibility challenges across audio visual media services, operating systems, and any digital interfaces tied to EAA compliance.
PRO TIP:
With TestResults, these types of issues can be detected early through intelligent UI automation.
Our platform helps testing teams validate state changes, focus behavior, and interactive components in ways that support accessible products and services, without claiming to perform full accessibility checks. Each step is documented and traceable, giving teams in regulated sectors the visibility they need to ensure compliance without increasing manual effort.
Final thoughts: Accessibility is a team sport
The European Commission developed the EAA with input from both industry and citizens. The result is one of the most comprehensive efforts to remove barriers created by inaccessible design, not just for users with disabilities, but for anyone using digital services in diverse or challenging environments.
If you're in a regulated sector, the EAA is not just a design issue, it’s a testing issue. And it’s your chance to:
- Improve quality coverage for key user flows
- Prevent accessibility regressions before they ship
- Build stronger internal processes for WCAG compliance and risk mitigation
You don’t need to become an accessibility expert. But you do need testing infrastructure that supports stability, audit readiness, and team-wide accountability.
Looking to reinforce your testing process ahead of the EAA deadline?
TestResults helps regulated industries automate UI testing, validate system behavior, and maintain complete traceability, all without needing to write or maintain test code. We’ll help you test what matters, where it matters. Let’s have a chat!
