Website accessibility from 28 June 2025: who is covered and what to do

Since 28 June 2025, Poland has had an act that requires some businesses to run accessible websites and online stores. Plenty of myths circulate around it online: that it applies to every website, that the penalty is 10% of turnover, that every business must have an accessibility statement. Below I explain whom the rules really cover, what you have to do and what inspections look like in practice.

I’m not a lawyer. I rely on the text of the act, the guidance from PFRON (the State Fund for the Rehabilitation of Disabled Persons) and the ministries’ replies, and as someone who implements accessibility on websites, I also write about how it looks technically. In unusual cases, consult a lawyer.

What the regulation is

It is the Act of 26 April 2024 on ensuring that economic operators meet accessibility requirements for certain products and services (ustawa o zapewnianiu spełniania wymagań dostępności niektórych produktów i usług przez podmioty gospodarcze; Journal of Laws 2024, item 731), known as the Polish Accessibility Act (Polski Akt o Dostępności). It implements the EU directive known as the European Accessibility Act.

The aim is for people with disabilities, older people and everyone who has temporary difficulties, e.g. a broken arm or poor eyesight, to be able to shop and use services online on their own.

Who it covers

The act covers specific services provided to consumers:

• e-commerce services, i.e. in practice online stores and other services ordered over the internet,
• retail banking,
• telecommunications services,
• distribution of e-books,
• access to audiovisual services,
• websites, apps and e-tickets of carriers in passenger transport.

E-commerce raises the most questions. The act defines it as services offered at a distance through websites and mobile devices, at the individual request of a consumer, with a view to concluding a contract. The Ministry of Digital Affairs (Ministerstwo Cyfryzacji) reads this broadly: it covers all forms of offering and providing services over the internet.

In its explanations, PFRON goes even further. If a website shows products or services and lets you submit an inquiry or start concluding a contract, then according to PFRON it is an e-commerce service, even when the sale itself takes place in the traditional way. However, these explanations are not a binding interpretation of the law, and no court has addressed the matter yet.

Microenterprises are exempt

The exemption applies to businesses that provide services and in at least one of the last two financial years employed on average fewer than 10 people and had annual net turnover or a balance sheet total of up to the equivalent of EUR 2 million. If you run a small online store with a handful of people, the act most likely does not cover you.

The exemption does not apply to products. A microenterprise that makes or sells, for example, e-book readers or payment terminals still has obligations related to those products.

What you have to do

If the act covers you, you have five tasks:

1. Bring your website or store into line with the accessibility requirements. In practice this means the EN 301 549 standard, which refers to the WCAG 2.1 guidelines at level AA. PFRON’s guidance is based on exactly these. In September 2026 a new version of the standard with WCAG 2.2 was published; it will start to apply once it is published in the Official Journal of the EU, so it is worth aiming at WCAG 2.2 right away.
2. Describe how the service meets the requirements, in the terms and conditions or another equivalent document. According to PFRON, information on the website alone is not enough, and there is no ready-made template. This is not the “accessibility statement” that public institutions must publish.
3. Accept complaints and respond to them within 30 days, or up to 60 days in complicated cases.
4. Document the conformity assessment and keep the documents for 5 years after the end of providing the service.
5. Notify the authority if the service does not meet the requirements. For e-commerce this is the Minister of Digital Affairs, who provides a ready-made template for the notification. If everything is in order, you report nothing.

The act also has transitional periods. Contracts concluded before 28 June 2025 may remain in force until they expire, at the latest until 28 June 2030. Audio and video recordings and documents (e.g. PDFs) published before that date do not have to be adapted.

What most often breaks accessibility

The organization WebAIM analyzes the home pages of the million most popular websites every year. In the 2026 report, 95.9% of pages had accessibility errors, 56 per page on average. The most common problems:

Stores do worse than the average, with 71 errors per page on average, and stores on PrestaShop, popular in Poland, as many as 143. This is an automated study, so there are more real problems. A tool cannot check, for example, whether you can shop using the keyboard alone.

Fortunately, these errors can be caught and fixed: contrast is a matter of changing colors, and image descriptions and field labels are a few lines of code. Harder are the cart and payments, which must work with a keyboard and a screen reader.

Inspections and penalties in practice

The whole system is supervised by the President of PFRON, and for e-commerce also by the Minister of Digital Affairs. Anyone can submit a notification about an inaccessible service to PFRON, even without first complaining to the business. By the end of July 2026, 139 such notifications had been received.

The procedure is gradual. First the authority calls for the problems to be removed within up to 120 days. Only if the business fails to do so can it issue an order, a ban on providing the service or impose a penalty. The penalty is at most ten times the average monthly salary of the previous year, which in 2026 means up to PLN 89,035.60, and cannot exceed 10% of annual turnover. So that 10% is an upper limit, not the size of the penalty, as some portals write. According to the ministries’ replies to parliamentary interpellations, no penalty had been imposed as of August 2026.

No penalties does not mean no risk. Any customer can submit a notification, and a call for corrections means working under deadline pressure. It is better to do it calmly and earlier.

Accessibility overlays are not a solution

Many websites have gained widgets with an icon of a person in a circle that promise accessibility “with one line of code”. Such an overlay lets you enlarge the text or change the colors, but it does not fix the website’s code: it won’t add meaningful image descriptions, label form fields or make the cart work from the keyboard. It often gets in the way of people who use screen readers, who have their own, better tools. Accessibility has to be built into the website.

An example: my website

On my own website I do what I recommend to clients. robimyweb.pl scores 100/100 in the Google Lighthouse accessibility audit on all subpages and works on screens from 320 px wide. I have also published a voluntary accessibility statement, in which I honestly describe what is still missing.

How much it costs to adapt a website

An audit and adaptation of a website to WCAG costs from PLN 1,490 net with me. It includes automated and manual checks, including keyboard and screen reader operation, and fixes in the code. If the website is old and fixes would cost more than a new version, a redesign costs from PLN 2,900 net, and a new online store built accessible from the start from PLN 5,900 net.

Check your website

You can detect basic accessibility errors for free with the tool Check your website. If you want a full audit or you don’t know whether the act covers you, write via the form. I will reply within 24 hours, and new customers get 20% off their first project.