To get web accessibility clients after the European Accessibility Act, write to EU companies that run a covered service online and are too large to count as microenterprises. Reach the person who owns the website or app, show them one real issue on their own pages, and offer a short walkthrough of it.
Leave fines out of the first message. A fine in the first line makes the reader defensive before you have earned a minute.
Which companies does the EAA cover?
The European Accessibility Act is Directive (EU) 2019/882. It sets common accessibility rules for selected goods and services across the EU. Member States had to apply their national measures from 28 June 2025 (EU Directive 2019/882 on EUR-Lex).
The European Commission lists phones and computers among the products, and banking and payments, public transport, online shops and telecoms among the services (Commission update, July 2025).
For an agency that audits sites and apps, the services are the market. Under the Directive, service providers that are microenterprises (fewer than 10 people and annual turnover or balance sheet of EUR 2 million or less) sit outside the service requirements. An EAA email to a tiny web shop is wrong from the first line.
Four checks decide who goes on the list:
- The company offers a covered service to EU customers: an online store, a banking or payment product, passenger transport booking or telecoms.
- It is clearly bigger than a microenterprise. Its own digital, product or e-commerce team is a good sign.
- The service runs on a site or app you can open today. These accounts go to the top, because you can show them something real.
- It is not a B2B firm with a brochure site. Those firms may still buy accessibility work, but the EAA is the wrong reason to write to them.
Whether one specific company is legally in scope stays with its own counsel. The checks only decide who you contact.
Why do prospects listen now?
The deadline has passed, and most popular websites still fail automated checks. In February 2026, WebAIM ran WAVE, a free automated checker, on the home pages of the top 1,000,000 websites (WebAIM Million). It found failures of WCAG 2 (the W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) on 95.9% of them. Each home page averaged about 56 detected errors.
The same scan found low contrast text on 83.9% of those home pages, up from 79.1% in 2025.
So you can usually find a visible issue before you write, and the prospect can confirm it in a minute. These are automated detections on home pages of popular sites worldwide, which means the sample is global rather than EU-only, so a contrast failure gets you a conversation, nothing more. Treat every error as an emergency and you sound like a scanner vendor.
Who signs off accessibility work?
In a Gartner survey of 632 B2B buyers, a typical buying group had 5 to 16 members from up to four functions (Gartner, May 2025).
In an accessibility deal, three roles are worth mapping first:
- Digital lead (head of digital, head of e-commerce). Owns the site, its budget and its release calendar, and watches checkout completion. In retail, start here.
- Product lead (head of product, product owner for the app or checkout). Owns the backlog and the design system, and wants fixes that fit into sprints and stop repeating in shared components.
- Compliance or legal lead (compliance officer, head of risk, legal counsel). Owns exposure and wants evidence plus a plan they can defend. In banks and payment providers, start here.
Take titles from your own wins: note who approved each accessibility project you have sold. Drop generic titles like Assistant, Manager or Associate. A named accessibility lead goes first, because that person often already suspects the problems and may need help getting budget for them.
What should the first message offer and say?
The first message sells the meeting. Offer something small with a clear scope: a 20-minute walkthrough of scan findings on the home page, one product page and checkout, or a one-page issue summary for the main purchase flow. For product teams, offer a review of one shared component instead, such as the form fields in their design system.
Many accessibility agencies list audits, remediation, training, monitoring and documentation on one page, then wonder why outreach goes quiet. When the packaging is off, everything feels heavy. Put ONE entry offer in every message and keep the menu for the second call. Agencies in other fields, such as design agencies and marketing agencies, have the same job of picking one entry offer.
An example, written for an invented retail prospect:
Hi Laura, I tested your checkout with an accessibility checker this morning. The card number and expiry fields have no labels, so a screen reader cannot tell the shopper what to type. Now that the EAA applies to online shops, this is the flow I would fix first. Would a 20-minute walkthrough of the three issues I found, with fixes your developers can pick up, help?
Before replying, Laura will open your LinkedIn profile and your site. Nobody signs a deal because of one email - they decide after checking who sent it.
If your headline says "web developer" and there are no accessibility case studies, a sharp finding reads like a trick. An average message from a profile full of proof beats a flawless one from an empty profile, every time. One company got a 2% reply rate and another 7.5% from the same message in our campaigns, and the difference was the foundations behind the sender.
| Role | Lead with | Leave out |
|---|---|---|
| Head of digital or e-commerce | One issue in the purchase or sign-up flow and what it does to completed orders | "Your site is non-compliant" |
| Head of product | Where the issue sits in a shared component, so one fix repairs many pages | "You need a full rebuild" |
| Compliance or legal lead | A documented review of key flows they can show internally | Fines or any penalty figure |
| Named accessibility lead | Extra capacity for findings they already suspect | An explainer on what the EAA is |
How do you build the list?
Start with the companies that already paid you and find lookalikes by sector, size and type of site. Then commit to one sector, one geography and one offer for 12 months, for example online retailers in the Netherlands and the Nordics with their own e-commerce team.
Run every address through a verifier so bounces stay under 0.5%, and keep an exclusion list of clients, open deals and opt-outs that every send respects.
The EAA is one law for the whole EU, but cold email rules change at each border. Prospects in Czechia, Germany and Austria get cold email from us only where a compliant legal basis exists; otherwise we reach them on LinkedIn.
If one sector in one country holds too few companies, add a second geography or a second role per company. The list and targeting FAQ covers sizing in more detail.
What does the outreach sequence look like?
Open on LinkedIn and let email follow, so the email arrives from a name they have already seen. Plan five or six touches across both channels:
- Connect on LinkedIn with a short note that mentions their checkout, app or sector
- Once a connection is accepted, send the single observation and the walkthrough offer
- Email with more detail: which page, which flow, what a fix involves
- Proof: a short case study from a similar company with its before and after findings
- A follow-up written for the second role, such as the product lead
- A brief note that closes the loop
Plan for the follow-up. In our campaigns, the third touch, with a real gap before it, is usually the one that earns the reply. When someone replies, answer their question, book the walkthrough and send the findings before the call.
How should you judge the first 90 days?
Count conversations started. Conversations come first, calls come out of conversations, and paid audits come out of calls. Most people you reach are busy, unready or uninterested this quarter.
Writing to 50 to 100 perfect-fit accounts a month is a coin flip against that, so you need enough volume that a few say yes anyway. Volume negates luck. Based on our campaigns, you need to contact at least 10,000 people a month to book 30 to 35 calls.
- Month 1: list quality. Bounce rate, accounts that should have failed the four checks, and "not my area" replies.
- Month 2: reply quality. Which role answers and which objections repeat ("we already have a vendor", "legal is handling it").
- Month 3: walkthroughs booked, walkthroughs held and paid audits signed.
Judge month 3 by the number of walkthroughs held, and ignore emails sent. I have no accessibility campaign of my own to quote here, so set your targets from your own first quarter. Find one real issue, show it to the person who owns it, and sell the walkthrough before the audit.
If you run an accessibility agency and want a second pair of eyes on your first walkthrough offer or target list, send me the draft. Book a call.
Questions accessibility agencies ask about outreach
Should the walkthrough be free, and should the audit be paid?
Keep the free part narrow: one or two flows, shown on a short call. Charge for the full audit. Any real work should be paid. When I hire, I never ask anyone to do a free project, and your prospects should not expect one from you either. A full audit handed over for nothing teaches them that your expertise is free.
Should you promise prospects EAA compliance?
No. Describe what you found and what fixing it involves, and leave the legal reading to the client's counsel. A compliance promise is a legal claim your agency may not be able to stand behind, and buyers in banking or payments spot it quickly. What you can deliver and sign for is findings, fixes and documentation.
Does the EAA matter for companies outside the EU?
It can. The Directive applies to covered products placed on the EU market and covered services provided to consumers in the EU (Directive 2019/882), so a UK or US company selling covered services into the EU can belong on your list.
What reply rate should an accessibility agency expect from cold email?
Our numbers, for what they are worth: about 1% of cold emails get a reply, and the rate sinks toward 0.5% once sending hits the thousands per day. Somewhere between 10% and 50% of those replies end up as booked meetings. A tight, heavily personalized list can reach 15% to 17%. Read them as ranges that shift with volume.