Regulations That Apply the Moment You Serve Overseas
The European Accessibility Act (EAA, Directive 2019/882) took full effect on 28 June 2025. If you supply products or services into the EU market, it applies regardless of where your company is incorporated. In the United States, the Department of Justice's ADA Title II final rule requires public entities serving populations of 50,000 or more to meet WCAG 2.1 AA by 24 April 2026, with smaller entities following by April 2027. Private businesses under Title III face no equivalent technical rule, but they face litigation instead: web accessibility lawsuits in the US have run at roughly 4,000 filings per year in recent years.
The scope goes well beyond websites. Mobile apps, e-books and PDF documents, ATMs and ticketing kiosks, e-commerce cart and checkout flows, and customer support channels are all covered. In Korea, the Anti-Discrimination Against Persons with Disabilities Act mandates information accessibility, and the national standard KWCAG 2.2 is built on WCAG. Meet the domestic standard properly and much of your overseas exposure is already handled.
Translating WCAG Into Engineering Terms
At the code level, the four principles read like this:
WebAIM's annual survey of the top one million home pages found in 2025 that roughly 95% still carried WCAG failures, averaging more than 50 detected errors per page. Yet the failures cluster in a handful of categories: low contrast text at about 79%, missing image alt text at about 56%, missing form input labels at about 48%, and empty links at about 45%. That is a fundamentals problem, not an advanced engineering problem.
The hard part is dynamic UI. When a modal opens, background content must be hidden from assistive technology, focus must be trapped inside, and on close it must return to the triggering button. Toast notifications need to live in an `aria-live` region to reach users who cannot see the screen. Infinite scroll should announce how many items were appended and leave a keyboard path to the footer. Be careful: misapplied ARIA is worse than none at all. A plain `
On multilingual sites, go beyond `` and set `lang` at the passage level. If an English sentence sits inside a Korean page with no marker, the screen reader will pronounce English through a Korean speech engine and produce something no one can follow.
When Fixing It Is Cheapest
It is a long-standing observation in software engineering that a defect caught at design time costs a fraction of the same defect caught after release. Accessibility widens that gap. Changing a color palette or a component structure is a few files during design and a full-surface regression after launch.
The most efficient strategy is to build accessibility into design system components. Get four things right — button, input field, modal, tabs — and hundreds of screens are fixed at once.
Do not rely on automated scanners alone. Tools such as axe, Lighthouse, and Pa11y detect roughly 30–40% of violations. Whether alt text actually says "image1", or whether focus order matches visual order, still requires a human. Put a manual pass through your key flows with NVDA and VoiceOver on the pre-release checklist.
Embedding It in the Organization
Benefits Beyond Compliance
Korea passed the 20% threshold for residents aged 65 and over in late 2024, entering super-aged society status. Raising contrast and enlarging touch targets benefits not only users with disabilities but older users and anyone tapping through an app on a moving train. Semantic markup, alt text, and video captions are also exactly what search engines use to understand your content, so the work pays back in SEO.
At POLYGLOTSOFT, we treat accessibility not as a one-time audit but as an ongoing monthly improvement track. Under our subscription development plans, we embed accessibility into design system components, attach automated checks to CI to prevent regressions, and deliver a monthly report covering manual test results and remediation progress. If you need EAA or ADA readiness, or simply want an assessment of where your current service stands, please get in touch.