Report Finds None of 60 Irish Financial Firms' Customer Documents Meet EU Accessibility Rules
Financial services firms in Ireland are struggling to meet accessibility requirements that came into law last year, according to new research reported by RTÉ. The European Accessibility Act came into force in June 2025 and requires websites, apps and devices to be accessible for people with disabilities and older people.
ComplyLoft, a Dublin-based document compliance platform, randomly selected one digital customer document from each of 60 Irish financial services companies. After undergoing testing, none of the 60 documents were found to conform with the requirements of the European Accessibility Act, the company said.
The Act extends beyond a company's website to the digital documents customers are given, including terms of business, fee schedules, product guides and mortgage information. To work with a screen reader, a PDF must include hidden structural information behind the page that identifies headings, tables, reading order and what each image shows. ComplyLoft said most of the documents it tested were missing the basic features a screen reader relies on, and that 48 of the 60 documents had no structural information at all.
Conor Wilson, founder and CEO of ComplyLoft, said an accessibility gap in a document is invisible to the people producing it and to the people signing it off, but is critically important to the person who relies on a screen reader or other assistive technology to interpret what the document says. For a customer who is blind or vision impaired, the company added, the absence of structure means having no way to skip to the interest rate on a mortgage information document or to the charges on a fee schedule.
Under the European Accessibility Act, companies that fail to comply could face fines and even prison sentences for senior staff, RTÉ reported. The findings suggest that many financial services providers still have significant work to do to bring their customer-facing documents into line with the rules.