Until recently, digital accessibility across the EU was mostly a matter of goodwill: a line in a style guide, a well meaning internal policy, occasionally real practice, but rarely something a regulator asked to see. That has changed. A large share of the private sector now carries a binding legal duty to build accessible products and services, with real consequences for skipping it.
The reason the EU legislates this centrally, rather than leaving it to each national government, is the internal market. Without a common floor, all 27 member states could each write their own accessibility rules, and a company selling one website, app, or self-service kiosk across borders would face 27 different rulebooks for the same product. The EU's answer is a single baseline every member state must meet, so a business that clears it once has effectively cleared it across the whole Union.
This course is built for the people who actually own the outcome, not for accessibility specialists alone: product leads who decide what ships, legal and compliance leads who own the risk, and engineering leads who own the fix. None of you needs to become a lawyer by the end of it, but all three need the same working map of what is required, of whom, and by when.
One caveat carries through every module. This course is education, not legal advice. It builds an accurate working model of the European Accessibility Act, the Web Accessibility Directive, EN 301 549, and WCAG, but a live compliance question, especially one involving penalties or an active investigation, belongs with qualified counsel in the markets you actually serve.
Nothing in this course is legal advice. It gives product, legal, and engineering leads a shared working model; confirm anything you plan to rely on with qualified counsel in your target markets.