Your museum's accessibility has been illegal since 2025, and you don't know it

The rule nobody noticed

The European Accessibility Act came into force on 28 June 2025. No museum received a letter. No call for funding made it an explicit condition in a uniform way. There was no communication campaign comparable to the one for GDPR. And yet the law exists, it is operational, and it applies to digital services offered to the public, and an audio guide or a museum app is precisely that: a digital service that a person uses to access content.

The gap between "the law exists" and "the museum sector has noticed" is where the most interesting part of this article plays out: not so much what the law says, but why an entire sector keeps behaving as if it did not concern it.

What changes in practice

It is not about rebuilding the website, nor replacing a museum's entire digital infrastructure. It is about making content accessible to people with visual, hearing or cognitive disabilities, through concrete, limited interventions:

• alternative text for audio content, so that those who cannot listen still have access to the information
• screen reader compatibility for the app or website interface
• subtitles or transcripts for every piece of audio content
• contrast and text size adjustable by the user
• sign language paths where the content requires them

None of these points, taken individually, is a huge project. It is the unplanned sum of them that makes them seem insurmountable.

Why the risk is not the fine

For an average museum, the concrete risk is not so much the administrative penalty, which requires enforcement activity that in many contexts is still at an early stage. The real risk is exclusion from calls for funding and grants that increasingly include digital accessibility among eligibility requirements or scoring criteria. A museum that cannot demonstrate an accessible path today loses points before the project is even assessed on its cultural or scientific merit. And in a competitive call, a few points decide everything.

There is also a second risk, less visible but just as concrete: a museum that presents its digital offering as "for everyone" when it is not truly so exposes a gap between promise and reality that, at a time of growing attention to inclusion, can become a reputational problem before a legal one.

Where to start

Three steps that do not require a lead-applicant budget:

1. A quick audit of existing content: which monuments or rooms already have a simplified text or a sign language video, and which do not. This census, on its own, often reveals that the problem is not "everything to be done" but "concentrated on half of the collection".
2. A priority on the most visited content, not on the whole collection at once. A museum's ten most visited stops almost always reach the majority of visitors: starting there produces real impact with limited effort.
3. A provider that treats accessibility as a native feature of the platform, not as a separate project to commission each time. It is the difference between an intervention that has to be repeated at every update and one that maintains itself.

The law does not ask for immediate perfection. It asks for a declared direction and a verifiable plan. This is exactly what most Italian museums lack today.

Learn more: discover amuseapp's accessibility features