The European Accessibility Act in Ireland: What S.I. 636/2023 Requires, and the 2030 Cliff Edge

The European Accessibility Act has been in force in Ireland since 28 June 2025, and most of the commentary about it has been written for designers. The parts that actually create legal exposure are not design questions. They are a documented assessment, a five-year renewal cycle, a funding condition that voids the main exception, and a transitional provision that expires in 2030.

Ireland transposed the Act through the European Union (Accessibility Requirements of Products and Services) Regulations 2023, S.I. No. 636/2023, notice of the making of which was published in Iris Oifigiúil on 15 December 2023. Regulation 1(2) brought it into operation on 28 June 2025.

What is in scope

Regulation 3(1) and (2) apply the Regulations to relevant products placed on the market, and relevant services provided to consumers, on or after 28 June 2025.

Products: consumer general-purpose computer hardware and operating systems; payment terminals; self-service terminals including ATMs, ticketing and check-in machines and interactive information terminals; consumer terminal equipment with interactive computing capability, such as smartphones; and e-readers.

Services: electronic communications services (excluding machine-to-machine transmission); services providing access to audiovisual media services; a range of transport-related websites, apps, e-tickets and self-service terminals; consumer banking services; e-books and dedicated software; and e-commerce services — which is the broadest category and the one that catches organisations who did not consider themselves in scope at all.

For financial services firms the point to note is that consumer banking services are expressly in scope and the Central Bank of Ireland is among the compliance authorities.

The microenterprise position is narrower than people assume

A microenterprise under Regulation 2(1) is one with fewer than 10 persons and turnover or balance sheet total not exceeding €2 million. The relief is real but partial, and it differs between services and products.

• Services: Regulation 5(4) disapplies Regulation 5(3) and Regulation 14 — the service provider obligations — for services provided by a microenterprise.
• Products: the relief is only procedural. Regulation 15(5) disapplies the documented-assessment and record-keeping duty in 15(4), but Regulation 15(6) still requires the microenterprise to provide the relevant facts if the market surveillance authority asks. Regulation 15(10) disapplies the duty to notify reliance on the exception.
• Regulation 17(6) requires that documentation obligations must not impose an undue burden on microenterprises or SMEs, and Regulation 5(6) obliges the market surveillance authority to provide guidelines and tools to microenterprises.

So a microenterprise selling products is not exempt from the accessibility requirements. It is exempt from writing the assessment down in advance — and can still be asked to justify its position.

The disproportionate burden exception, and the condition that voids it

The main escape route is that compliance is not required where it would fundamentally alter the basic nature of the product or service, or impose a disproportionate burden. But it is conditional, and the conditions are where firms come unstuck.

Regulation 15(2) requires an operator relying on the exception to carry out an assessment, using the criteria in Schedule 4 (Regulation 15(3)). Regulation 15(4)(b) requires a written record of the results kept for five years. And Regulation 15(7) requires a service provider to renew the assessment for each category or type of service: when the service is altered, when the compliance authority requests it, and in any event at least every five years.

Then the provision that catches people. Regulation 15(8): the exception is unavailable where the operator receives external funding, public or private, provided for improving accessibility. Take money earmarked for accessibility and you lose the right to argue that accessibility is a disproportionate burden. Any organisation drawing on grant funding for digital improvement should check what that funding was designated for before relying on the exception.

The transitional provisions, and the 2030 date

Regulation 38 is the reason this is not finished business, and the dates are worth recording precisely:

• Regulation 38(1)(a): a service provider may continue providing services using products it lawfully used earlier, for the period ending 28 June 2030.
• Regulation 38(1)(b): service contracts agreed before 28 June 2025 may continue unaltered until they expire, but for no longer than five years from that date.
• Regulation 38(2): self-service terminals lawfully in use before 28 June 2025 may continue until the end of their economically useful life, but no longer than 20 years after entry into use.

The practical reading is that a great many organisations are currently compliant because of Regulation 38 rather than because of anything they did. That position expires, and the twenty-year terminal allowance will outlive most of the people currently responsible for it — which makes the asset register the document that matters, not the policy.

Who enforces it, and what it costs

Enforcement is split. The Competition and Consumer Protection Commission is the market surveillance authority for in-scope products. For services the authority depends on the service, and the list includes the Commission for Communications Regulation, Coimisiún na Meán, the Irish Aviation Authority, the National Transport Authority, the Central Bank of Ireland and the CCPC.

Authorities can issue directions to comply, and consumers can apply to the Circuit Court for a compliance order — so enforcement is not solely regulator-led.

On penalties: summary conviction carries a class A fine of up to €5,000, imprisonment of up to six months, or both. Conviction on indictment carries a fine of up to €60,000, imprisonment of up to 18 months, or both. Directors, managers, secretaries and other officers can be personally liable where the offence was committed with their consent, connivance or approval, or is attributable to their wilful neglect.

There is no training requirement, and that is the interesting part

It is worth being accurate about this, because accessibility training is widely marketed as an EAA compliance requirement. The Regulations contain no staff training obligation. Unlike the Central Bank’s Minimum Competency Code, which specifies hours, or CORU’s credit requirements, S.I. 636/2023 imposes no competence standard on the people doing the work.

What it does impose is a set of obligations that cannot be discharged without competence. Someone has to apply the Schedule 4 criteria to a disproportionate burden assessment, write it in a form that survives five years of scrutiny, recognise when a service alteration triggers a renewal, and know that external accessibility funding voids the exception entirely. Those are judgement tasks, and a firm that assigns them to someone who has not read Schedule 4 has a documentation problem waiting to surface.

That is a familiar pattern from other Irish and EU regimes where the obligation is on the organisation rather than the individual. NIS2 and DORA both work this way for financial entities, and the contrast with an hours-based regime is clear in our guide to the Central Bank’s Minimum Competency Code.

What to check

Are you relying on Regulation 38 without knowing it — and do you know when each reliance expires? If you are claiming disproportionate burden, is there a written Schedule 4 assessment, is it less than five years old, and has it been renewed since the service last changed? Have you received any funding designated for accessibility, which would void the exception under 15(8)? If you are a microenterprise selling products, can you produce the facts on request even though you need not have written them down? And for consumer banking services, is the Central Bank’s role as compliance authority reflected in how the assessment is governed?

Accessibility obligations sit alongside the employment-law duties most organisations already manage, which are covered in our guides to reasonable accommodations and workplace accessibility and disability inclusion and reasonable adjustments at work. The EAA is a different obligation with a different enforcement route, and compliance with one does not evidence the other.