Since 28 June 2025 the European Accessibility Act has applied across the EU. It obliges companies to make certain products and services accessible — and that has concrete consequences for customer service. Anyone dealing with customers by phone, chat, email or web forms has to design those channels so that people with visual, hearing or motor impairments can use them too.
Each member state implements the directive in its own law: Germany through the Barrierefreiheitsstärkungsgesetz, France and the other states through their own instruments. The substance is the same everywhere, the wording and the enforcement bodies differ.
What is required of customer service
The scope covers online retail, banking and telecommunications services along with the support processes that accompany them. Where a company sells affected products or services to consumers, the customer service around them must provide information about accessibility and be compatible with assistive technology. A help desk should be able to say reliably whether and how an offering can be used without barriers.
Micro-enterprises — fewer than ten employees and up to two million euros in annual turnover — are exempt for services. For everyone else, breaches can lead to warnings and fines. The commercial effect weighs heavier still: whoever builds barriers permanently shuts out a substantial share of potential customers.
Accessibility is more than an accessible website
The relevant standards are the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and the European standard EN 301 549, which references them. They apply to digital content, but the underlying principles carry over to every service channel: content must be perceivable, operable, understandable and robust.
In practice that means a phone menu should not depend on hearing alone, a chat window has to work with a screen reader, and a form must be completable by keyboard. None of this is exotic — it is craft.
The two-senses principle and why one channel is not enough
A central principle is that important information should be conveyed through at least two senses, for instance visually and audibly. In practice a single channel rarely suffices. A company reachable only by phone excludes deaf people. One offering only a purely graphical chat makes life hard for people with impaired vision.
Accessible service therefore arises where customers can choose freely between equivalent channels:
- Voice for everyone who prefers to talk
- Text and chat as an alternative for people with hearing impairments
- Email and ticketing for traceable, time-independent exchanges
- Messaging such as WhatsApp for a low-threshold first contact
How myContactCenter supports accessible service
This is where myContactCenter comes in. The platform brings voice, chat, email, fax and messaging together in one interface, so equivalent channels are not a project in themselves but a configuration. Speech recognition turns spoken requests into text, speech synthesis turns text into announcements — the same content, reachable through a second sense.
The graphical process designer lets you build call flows that work without listening: written confirmation instead of an audible one, call-back instead of waiting on hold, a switch from voice to chat within the same case.
Where to start
Look at the channels you offer today and ask, for each one, who cannot use it. That question is quicker to answer than any audit and usually points straight to the gap. Everything else follows from there.
This article gives a general overview and does not replace legal advice. Which obligations apply in a specific case depends on the products and services offered and on the national implementation.
