A business website with a login environment — a customer portal, an ordering tool for existing clients, a subscription dashboard — does not automatically fall outside the European accessibility law. The regulation looks at the service being offered and who can access it through that environment, not at the 'business' label you place on it yourself.
The shortest answer: if individual persons (not just registered companies) can conclude an agreement or obtain a service through the account environment, that environment counts as part of a service offered to consumers. If access is strictly limited to existing business customers and concerns the management of an ongoing contract without a new agreement, that is different. It is a distinction that must be assessed case by case, and this is precisely where many SMEs become confused.
Why 'business' is not a free pass
Many business owners reason: our site is B2B, so the rules for consumer services do not apply. That is not always correct. Take an installation company that sends quotes through a portal and where individuals — not just contractors — can also create an account to place an order. Once that possibility exists, an element of service to consumers emerges, even if most customers are businesses. The regulation focuses on categories of services, such as e-commerce, and considers how an agreement is concluded, not who generates the most revenue.
A purely internal environment — for example a dashboard where only existing business customers view invoices after a contract concluded offline — lies closer to a grey area on which the text itself is less explicit. That is precisely the type of question for which in a few questions to see if this applies to you is intended: the scope check asks the questions that determine which side of that boundary your situation probably falls on.
The account environment counts separately from the rest of the site
Another misunderstanding: if the public pages of a business website are accessible, the job is done. The account environment itself — the login screen, the ordering process behind it, forms to change data — falls under the same requirement once that environment is part of a service that falls within scope. That is also why a quick scan of the public core pages never tells the whole story: what lies behind the login is examined separately, precisely because that is where the ordering step, the contact form, or the account settings are located, where people using a screen reader or keyboard only run into trouble fastest.
The exemption for micro-enterprises applies here in the same way
For a business website with a login environment too, the exemption for micro-enterprises offering services applies: fewer than ten employees and at most two million euros annual turnover, and both conditions must apply at the same time. A small installation company with its own customer portal can thus still fall outside scope, not because the site is business-focused, but because the enterprise meets the exemption criteria. If you want to calmly compare those conditions with your own figures, that is something to read up calmly on the exemption for micro-enterprises before you look further at the rest of the site.
What to do if in doubt
The boundary between 'purely business' and 'also consumers' is not always easy to draw at first glance, especially for platforms that were originally built for one target group and have gradually expanded their reach. An automated test cannot answer that factual question — who can actually enter into an agreement here — on its own; that remains human work based on how your service is actually structured. For edge cases that differ slightly from what is described above, it is worth answers to other edge cases to review, and for a reasoned assessment of your own situation, a legal advisor or the supervisory authority in your country remains the appropriate point of contact.
Do you want to know first where you probably stand before you take that step? The free scope check answers in a few questions whether your business website, with or without a user account environment, falls within the scope of the law, and how we arrived at that assessment is explained on the site itself. That requires no account and no half hour of your day.