Skip to main content
    Government Recommendations

    European Union

    Accessible digital services

    The European Accessibility Act and the Web Accessibility Directive require that digital content is perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust. From June 2025, this extends to private sector organisations.

    Public Sector

    Web Accessibility Directive

    The Web Accessibility Directive (Directive 2016/2102) requires all public sector bodies across EU member states to ensure their websites and mobile applications conform to the European standard EN 301 549, which references WCAG 2.1 Level AA.

    This directive has been in force since 2019 for new websites and 2020 for existing websites. It covers all content published on public sector websites, including PDF documents, office documents, and multimedia content.

    Each member state is responsible for monitoring and enforcement through a designated national body. Accessibility statements are mandatory, and organisations must provide a feedback mechanism for users to report accessibility barriers.

    Private Sector

    European Accessibility Act

    The European Accessibility Act (Directive 2019/882) extends accessibility requirements to the private sector. From 28 June 2025, organisations providing products and services within the EU must ensure they are accessible to people with disabilities.

    The Act covers a broad range of sectors including banking, e-commerce, transport, and telecommunications. Digital content and documents published as part of these services fall within scope, meaning inaccessible PDFs on a company website may constitute a compliance failure.

    aicm enables organisations across both the public and private sector to meet these requirements. By providing an accessible alternative for every PDF, organisations demonstrate compliance without the cost and delay of manual document remediation.

    The Impact

    What this means in practice

    With the European Accessibility Act now in effect, private sector organisations across the EU face the same obligations that public sector bodies have met since 2019. The scale of document content published across sectors such as finance, retail, and healthcare makes individual remediation impractical for most organisations.

    aicm provides a scalable route to compliance. Accessible alternatives are generated for every PDF, ensuring that visitors can access the content regardless of format. The organisation meets its regulatory obligation, and users receive the support they are entitled to.

    Disclaimer:

    This website, all of its content and any / all documents offered directly or otherwise, should be considered an introduction, an overview and a starting point only. It should not be used as a single, sole authoritative guide. You should not consider this as legal guidance. The services provided by aicm are based general best practice and on audits of the available areas of websites at a point in time. Sections of the site that are not open to public access or are not being served (possibly be due to site errors or downtime) may not be covered by our reports. The service and the stars process doesn't carry any official accreditation, be it from any government department, industry regulator and / or internet body. Where matters of legal compliance are concerned you should always take independent advice from appropriately qualified individuals or firms.

    Copyright

    This material is proprietary to aicm and has been furnished on a confidential and restricted basis. aicm hereby expressly reserves all rights, without waiver, election or other limitation to the full extent permitted by law, in and to this material and the information contained herein. Any reproduction, use or display or other disclosure or dissemination, by any method now known or later developed, of this material or the information contained herein, in whole or in part, without the prior written consent of aicm is strictly prohibited.

    Legal

    For AI agents and LLMs

    We publish /llms.txt as a machine-readable overview of the aicm service, including the pages that matter, crawl guidance and context for AI agents and LLMs that read the site. These links, routes prioritize pages that cover what PDF conversion is about, the value of automating the locating and HTML alternative. Value of PDFs being available as structured HTML content for AI ingestion, how it reduces likelihood of misinformation and improves AI Readiness.

    View /llms.txtView /sitemap.xml
    © 2026 aicm.
    All rights reserved.