More and more store owners ask me not whether their site is accessible, but what happens to them if it is not. In Poland, penalties for missing digital accessibility in private businesses are set out in the Act of 26 April 2024 on ensuring compliance with accessibility requirements for certain products and services by economic operators (Journal of Laws 2024, item 731). It implements EU Directive 2019/882, better known as the European Accessibility Act, and it has applied since 28 June 2025. In this post I go through who can inspect you, how the act calculates a fine and what happens before anyone imposes one.
A disclaimer up front: this post is not legal advice. I am a developer, not a lawyer, so I quote the provisions from the text of the act and give article numbers so you can check them yourself, and the assessment of your own situation belongs with a lawyer. Who the new obligations cover in the first place is a separate topic, which I described in the post on who web accessibility law applies to - here I focus on what happens when you do not meet the requirements.
Who the penalties apply to and who supervises
The act splits responsibility plainly: for services, compliance is the duty of the service provider (Article 2). For an online store owner the key category is e-commerce services, which Article 5 defines as services provided at a distance through websites and mobile devices, at the individual request of a consumer, with a view to concluding a contract. Put simply: a store where a consumer can buy something, and a mobile app that lets them do the same.
There is an important exemption in Article 4: the act does not apply to services offered or provided by microenterprises. The act does not give its own definition of a microenterprise, so whether your company qualifies has to be checked against other legislation - and that is exactly the question to take to your accountant or lawyer rather than guessing from your headcount.
Who supervises? Article 38 describes the whole market surveillance system. It is made up of the President of the Management Board of PFRON (the State Fund for Rehabilitation of Disabled Persons), the market surveillance authorities and the customs authorities. The act assigns a separate authority to each group of services, for example:
- e-commerce services - the minister responsible for computerisation
- retail banking - the Financial Ombudsman
- telecommunications and e-books - the President of the Office of Electronic Communications
The President of PFRON monitors the whole system and oversees how those authorities apply the act (Article 39), and can also carry out an inspection and impose a fine directly.
Alongside this runs an entirely separate track for the public sector: the Act of 4 April 2019 on the digital accessibility of websites and mobile applications of public bodies. Government offices, schools and hospitals have their own obligations and their own procedure - if you run a private business, most of the articles about fines you will find online describe that track, not yours.
How a case actually starts
An inspection does not come out of nowhere. The act gives two routes by which an accessibility problem can reach an authority, and both start with a person who could not use your site.
The first is a consumer complaint to you (Articles 35-37). A consumer can complain in writing, orally or electronically, if you have named such a channel. You have 30 days to reply, and in particularly complicated cases you can extend that by notifying the consumer, but to no more than 60 days from receiving the complaint. And here is the part few people notice: if you miss the deadline, the complaint is deemed resolved in line with the complainant’s demand (Article 37(4)). A rejection, in turn, has to tell the consumer they can file a notification with PFRON.
The second route is a notification to the President of PFRON (Article 67). Anyone can file one, not only someone who bought from you. It is enough to name the service, the requirement it fails and the business that provides it.
From a developer’s point of view the conclusion is simple: an inbox where complaints land, and someone who watches the 30-day deadline, are part of your protection against a fine, just as much as a fixed form.
How large the penalties are - what the act says
I quote this part almost word for word, without interpretation, because this is where misunderstandings happen easily.
Under Article 73(1)(2), a fine may be imposed on a service provider who, among other things, fails to ensure that its services meet the accessibility requirements, fails to provide the authority with required information on time, or provides false information. The fine is up to ten times the average monthly salary in the national economy for the previous year, as announced by the President of Statistics Poland, but no more than 10% of turnover in the financial year preceding the year in which the fine is imposed.
The act then says:
- fines are imposed by the President of PFRON or the competent market surveillance authority, by way of a decision (Article 73(3))
- the amount is set taking into account the scope of the infringement, including its seriousness, the number of non-compliant services and the number of people adversely affected (Article 73(4))
- the fine is paid within 14 days of the day the decision became final, into the account of the Accessibility Fund (Article 73(5))
I deliberately do not give an amount in zloty here. The average salary changes every year and every company’s turnover is different, so you will work out your own upper limit from the current Statistics Poland announcement and your own figures - ideally together with a lawyer or accountant. The full text of the act is in the Journal of Laws, item 731 of 2024.
It is also worth knowing that a fine is not the only tool. Under Article 65, an authority that finds in an inspection that a service does not meet the requirements can, by decision, order you to make it accessible, prohibit you from offering the service, or order you to notify consumers of the extent of the non-compliance. For a store, a ban on offering the service is a worse outcome than a one-off fine.
Finally, the transitional provisions, because those are what I get asked about most. Service contracts concluded before 28 June 2025 can remain in force unchanged until they expire, but no later than 28 June 2030 (Article 85). Article 86, in turn, excludes some older content on websites: pre-recorded audio and video and document files published before the act came into force, and archived content that has not been updated since that day. That does not mean an old store is exempt as a whole - the exclusion covers specific kinds of content, not the site.
How to reduce the risk: audit, fix list, accessibility information
The act does not tell you to order anything in particular. It tells you to meet the requirements and to be able to show that you do. In practice that comes down to three steps.
1. An audit, so you know where you stand. Without one you do not know whether you have a problem or how big it is. You can start a WCAG audit yourself - the WCAG audit step by step guide walks you from going through the checkout with the keyboard alone to testing with a screen reader. If you would rather outsource it, the post on what an accessibility audit covers and what drives its cost explains how a proper audit differs from an automated scanner printout.
2. A fix list with an order of work. An audit without a repair plan is just a document proving you knew about the problem. I fix the path that earns money first: from the product page through the basket to payment. Then the elements shared across the whole site, meaning the theme, the menu and the forms. A detailed list for WordPress sites is in the post on what to fix for the European Accessibility Act in WordPress.
3. Information on how the service meets the requirements. In the public sector this document is called an accessibility statement. For businesses, the 2024 act uses different wording: Article 32 requires a service provider to make public, in its terms of service or an equivalent document, information about the service and how it meets the accessibility requirements. The same article obliges the provider to take corrective action when the service falls short and to inform the authority. Drafting that clause is a job for a lawyer - my role is to make sure that what it says is true on the site.
What helps: keep the audit date, the list of issues found and the date of every fix in one place. When a complaint or a question from an authority arrives, you answer from the work history rather than from memory.
What I do differently - fixes in the code, not an overlay
The most common temptation when someone hears about fines is to buy a plugin with a little person icon in the corner of the screen and call it done. The act, however, talks about a service meeting accessibility requirements, not about owning a tool. An overlay will not write a description for a product photo, will not tie a label to a field in the basket and will not make a payment error message audible to someone using a screen reader. Those things live in the code, and that is where I fix them.
The second difference: I do not treat accessibility as a one-off project. A store changes every week - a new plugin, a new banner, a new campaign template - and any of those changes can quietly break what was fixed six months earlier. That is why for clients who have ongoing support and site care with me, every larger change goes through the same short keyboard test before it reaches production. It costs less than another full audit and gives you what the act asks for: compliance today, not compliance on the day the project was handed over.
The third thing: I record what was fixed and when. If you ever have to answer a complaint or give an authority information, the record is there.
Frequently asked questions
Can I be fined for an inaccessible company website without a store? The act lists specific groups of services provided to consumers, including e-commerce. Whether your site falls into one of them depends on what you do on it and who you sell to - that is a question for a lawyer, and the starting point is Article 3(2) and the definitions in Article 5 of the act.
Who can report that my site is inaccessible? Under Article 67, anyone can file a notification with the President of PFRON. A consumer can also complain directly to you, and you then have 30 days to reply.
Does an accessibility plugin protect me from a fine? The act has no concept of an overlay. What counts is whether the service meets the accessibility requirements, and an overlay cannot achieve that on its own, because most problems sit in the site’s code.
Where do I start if I am worried about an inspection? With a WCAG audit of one checkout path, naming a person who receives complaints and watches the deadlines, and a conversation with a lawyer about the clause in your terms of service. Those three together give you more than any single plugin.
Would rather not watch over it every month yourself? I take sites and stores under ongoing care - backups, updates, monitoring, and priority when something breaks. See the plans: ongoing support.