Financial firms struggle to meet EU accessibility rules

Financial services firms are struggling to meet accessibility requirements that came into law last year, according to new research.

The European Accessibility Act came into force in June 2025 and requires websites, apps and devices to be accessible for people with disabilities and older people.

If companies fail to comply, they could be hit with fines and even prison sentences for senior staff.

The Act covers more than just a company's website and also extends to the digital documents customers are given, such as terms of business, fee schedules, product guides and mortgage information.

ComplyLoft, a Dublin-based document compliance platform, randomly selected one digital customer document from 60 Irish financial services companies.

After undergoing testing, none of the 60 documents were found to conform with the requirements of the European Accessibility Act.

"An accessibility gap in a document is invisible to the people producing it, invisible to the people signing it off, but critically important to the person that relies on a screen reader or other assistive technology to help them interpret and understand what the document and what it is saying," said Conor Wilson, Founder and CEO of ComplyLoft.

To work with a screen reader, a PDF document needs to include a hidden structure behind the page that tells assistance software what is a heading, what is a table, what order to read it in, and what each image shows.

Without this information, the document cannot be easily read or navigated by people using assistive technology.

According to ComplyLoft, none of the 60 documents it tested met the required standard.

"Most were missing the basic features a screen reader relies on, and 48 of the documents tested had no structural information at all," the company said.

"For a customer who is blind or vision impaired, that means they have no way to skip to the interest rate on a mortgage information document, or the charges on a fee schedule," it added.