The Accessibility Act Doesn't Care About Your Match-3. It Cares About Your Subscribe Button.

The European Accessibility Act reaches game portals through checkout, signup and support flows, not through the games themselves. Here is what compliance costs. The Act has applied since 28 June 2025, and the parts of your product it actually touches are the ones your team treats as plumbing.

That distinction is worth getting right, because most operators I talk to have filed this under "someone will tell us if it matters." The people who will tell you are not regulators. They are procurement departments at the telecom, bank and education buyers you are trying to sell into, and they started asking in 2026.

⚖️ The Act Lists Products and Services. Games Are Not On the List.

The European Accessibility Act is Directive (EU) 2019/882. It does not mention video games anywhere. It names a specific set of consumer products and services: computers and operating systems, smartphones, self-service terminals, e-readers, electronic communications services, access to audiovisual media services, e-books, certain transport services, consumer banking, and e-commerce.

Player Research's June 2025 breakdown for the games industry puts it plainly: the games themselves aren't listed as covered products or services, though they may host covered services. That is the whole trick. A game is out of scope. A game wrapped in a subscription purchase flow is not, because the purchase flow is e-commerce.

So the honest answer to "does the EAA apply to my portal?" is: not to your catalogue, almost certainly to your storefront. Which means the compliance work lands on the layer you probably built once in a fortnight three years ago and have not touched since.

🛒 Every Portal Has an E-Commerce Surface, Including the Free Ones

Operators assume this is a problem for paid portals only. It usually isn't. The covered surface is wider than a card form:

• Subscription signup and cancellation. The obvious one. If a player can buy, the buying journey needs to work with a screen reader and a keyboard.
• Account creation, login and password reset. These are part of the service journey, not separate from it.
• Identification, security and payment methods. Named explicitly — the flow, the confirmation, the electronic signature step.
• Support channels. A help page, a contact form, a chat widget. If your support flow is a VoIP number, electronic communications rules pull it in on their own.
• Terms, refund and accessibility information. Service providers have to publish accessibility information as part of their general terms. Not as a PDF nobody can read.

Note what is not on that list: the game canvas. A WebGL build that renders every button inside a <canvas> element is opaque to a screen reader, and under the Act as written, that is not the thing that gets you fined. It might still cost you a deal — see procurement, below — but the legal exposure sits in the wrapper.

💬 If You Ship Chat, You Have a Second Regulator

Add real-time text chat, voice chat or a party system to a portal and the analysis changes on both sides of the Atlantic. In the EU, chat is an electronic communications service, which is on the list.

In the US, the Twenty-First Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act has covered in-game communications since the FCC's class waiver for video game software expired on 31 December 2018. Games released from 1 January 2019, and older games that undergo a substantial upgrade, carry advanced communications services obligations. That covers the chat feature and the UI used to navigate it — not the gameplay.

The practical read: chat is the single feature that converts an out-of-scope catalogue into an in-scope one in two jurisdictions at once. If your product roadmap has "add social" on it, price the accessibility work into that ticket rather than discovering it later.

📏 The Yardstick Moves to WCAG 2.2, Probably in October

Conformance is measured against EN 301 549, the harmonised European ICT accessibility standard. The version currently cited is v3.2.1 from March 2021, which maps to WCAG 2.1 Level A and AA. ETSI published a draft of v4.1.0 for public review in November 2025, and the expectation across accessibility vendors is that the final v4.1.1 is referenced in the Official Journal around October 2026, aligning clauses 9, 10 and 11 with WCAG 2.2 AA.

Treat that date as an expectation rather than a deadline — draft timelines slip, and the comment process can move it. But the content of the change is already visible in the draft, and three of the six new success criteria land directly on things game UIs do.

Dragging Movements (2.5.7, AA)

Any action achieved by dragging needs a single-pointer alternative, unless the dragging is essential to the function. Slider-based volume controls, drag-to-reorder favourites lists, carousel swipes — those need a tap alternative. A match-3 board where swapping tiles is the mechanic has a real claim to the essential exception. A settings panel does not.

Target Size, Minimum (2.5.8, AA)

Targets need to be at least 24×24 CSS pixels, with exceptions for adequate spacing, an equivalent control elsewhere on the page, inline targets in text, user-agent-set sizing, and essential presentation. The W3C's WCAG 2.2 recommendation spells out the spacing maths: if a 24px-diameter circle centred on each undersized target doesn't intersect another target's circle, you pass.

This one bites portals specifically. Dense game-thumbnail grids with a tiny favourite-star and a tiny category tag stacked in the corner of each tile are exactly the pattern the criterion was written about.

Accessible Authentication, Minimum (3.3.8, AA)

No cognitive function test in the login flow unless you provide an alternative or a mechanism to get past it. Puzzle CAPTCHAs, "type the third character of your memorable word", image-selection challenges — all of these need a way around. Portals that added a puzzle CAPTCHA to fight bot signups should read this criterion before the next audit, not after.

🏢 Who Actually Gets Out of This

Two exemptions matter, and both are narrower than people hope.

Microenterprises providing services are exempt: fewer than 10 staff and annual turnover or balance sheet total under €2 million. Both conditions, not either. A four-person portal operator with €500k in revenue is genuinely outside the service obligations. A twelve-person one is not, no matter how small the revenue.

Disproportionate burden is available but it is not a shrug. It requires a documented assessment weighing the cost of the change against the size and resources of the business, kept on file and re-run periodically. "We looked at it and it seemed expensive" is not the assessment. If you plan to lean on this, write it down properly now, because the moment it is useful is the moment someone has already asked.

There is also a transitional window running to 2030 for service providers continuing to use products they were lawfully using before the deadline. That is a runway for legacy hardware, not a general amnesty on your website.

💸 What Non-Compliance Costs, and Why the Number You Googled Is Probably Wrong

Penalties are set nationally, and the published figures disagree badly depending on who compiled the list. Level Access's 2026 penalty guide gives Germany a maximum of €100,000 for supplying non-compliant products and services plus €10,000 for inaccurate accessibility information; Italy up to 5% of annual turnover for entities already covered by the Stanca Law and up to €40,000 otherwise; France €50,000 for failing web accessibility standards plus €25,000 for related offences such as not publishing an accessibility statement.

Other trackers circulating in 2026 publish materially different figures for the same countries — France at €250,000, Hungary above €1.2 million, Spain at €1 million. I cannot reconcile those against primary sources, and neither can you from a blog table. The only number that binds you is the one in the transposing national law of the country where you provide the service. If a compliance budget is being defended on the strength of a vendor's comparison chart, that budget is built on sand.

On enforcement activity, the same guide reports Swedish market surveillance beginning in October 2025, Danish authorities contacting businesses around the same time, and active Dutch enforcement expected in the second half of 2026. I have not confirmed those in regulator publications, so treat them as directional rather than established. What is not in dispute: all 27 member states have transposed, and the deadline has passed.

📋 Procurement Will Reach You Before a Regulator Does

Here is the part that actually changes revenue. The buyers a games catalogue sells into — carriers, banks, universities, public-sector portals, large retail — have accessibility obligations of their own, and they discharge part of them by pushing requirements down the supply chain.

What that looks like in an RFP:

• A conformance report against EN 301 549 or WCAG 2.1 AA for anything embedded in their property.
• A named accessibility contact and a remediation timeline for defects.
• Contractual warranties that what you supply doesn't break their own conformance claim.
• For public-sector buyers, the Web Accessibility Directive obligations that have applied since 2018 and never went away.

A licensor who can answer those questions with documents wins tenders against one who can't, regardless of catalogue quality. This is the same dynamic as age ratings and privacy disclosures: the compliance artefact becomes a sales asset. If you run a white-label portal for third parties, your client's obligations flow to you by contract even where the Act wouldn't reach you directly.

🚫 Five Ways Operators Get This Wrong

1. Installing an overlay widget and calling it done. Automated overlays and toolbars are marketed as one-line compliance. They do not produce conformance against EN 301 549, they are the single most reliably criticised approach in the accessibility community, and their presence signals to an auditor that nobody did the work. Fix the markup.
2. Auditing the games and ignoring the wrapper. Exactly backwards. The catalogue is largely out of scope; the subscribe button is not.
3. Assuming a non-EU company is out of reach. The Act applies to services provided to consumers in the EU. Where your company is incorporated is not the test.
4. Treating the accessibility statement as a legal deliverable. It is a product deliverable that has to be accurate. Publishing a statement claiming conformance you don't have converts a technical gap into a misrepresentation.
5. Waiting for WCAG 2.2 before starting. The six new criteria are additive. Everything in 2.1 AA is already the binding standard today, and it is where the real remediation volume sits.

🎮 Where a Licensed Catalogue Fits

Licensing shapes this problem more than it solves it. A licensed catalogue means the surface you have to remediate is your own — the storefront, the account flows, the subscription journey, the game frame and its controls — rather than several hundred individual builds you'd otherwise own outright. That's a smaller and more tractable scope than the alternative.

It also means the accessibility characteristics of individual titles are a due-diligence question at purchase time rather than an engineering backlog afterwards. Ask about keyboard input, pause behaviour, colour dependence and text scaling before you buy, the same way you'd ask about load size or ad-SDK behaviour. Forestry Games has licensed HTML5 and Android titles since 2017 across a catalogue of 1,049 games, including work for telecom and operator portals — the buyer category where procurement-driven accessibility requirements show up earliest and most formally.

🧭 What to Do This Quarter

Not a compliance programme. Four things, in order:

1. Draw the scope line on paper. List every surface between a player arriving and a player paying or getting support. That list is your in-scope inventory. The games are not on it unless they contain chat or purchases.
2. Run a keyboard-only pass on that inventory. No tooling, no budget, one afternoon. Unplug the mouse and try to subscribe. Most portals fail this at the payment step or in a modal that traps focus. Automated scanners will not find either.
3. Write the accessibility statement honestly. Current conformance level, known gaps, remediation dates, a contact address. An accurate statement listing gaps is a defensible position; an inflated one is not.
4. Add the four procurement questions to your sales collateral before a buyer asks them. Conformance target, testing method, remediation SLA, named contact. The first tender that asks will not give you three weeks to invent answers.

The Act has been in force for over a year and the standard tightens again this autumn. The cheap moment to deal with this was before the storefront was built; the second-cheapest is now, while it's still a backlog item rather than a blocked deal.