The EAA exemption most vendors skip: Article 4(5) also cancels the paperwork

A vendor who sells European Accessibility Act compliance tooling has published, on dev.to, the sentence his own funnel depends on not saying: most of the people currently being sold tools like his do not have to comply with anything ^[1]. The reason is worth more than the confession, because the exemption in Article 4(5) of Directive (EU) 2019/882 does not stop at the technical requirements ^[2]. The text reads: "Microenterprises providing services shall be exempt from complying with the accessibility requirements referred to in paragraph 3 of this Article and any obligations relating to the compliance with those requirements" ^[2]. The second clause is the one that matters if you are holding a quote. According to the author, it takes in the accessibility statement, the Annex V information and the documentation ^[3]. That is precisely the artefact most of this tooling is sold to generate. Then the definition, from Article 3: an enterprise employing fewer than 10 persons and with annual turnover not exceeding EUR 2 million or an annual balance sheet total not exceeding EUR 2 million ^[4]. The conjunctions carry the whole test. Headcount is an and, and it is mandatory ^[5]; nine people with EUR 30 million of turnover is not a microenterprise ^[6]. The money is an or: one of the two figures under two million, not both ^[7]. The author says he has seen it written as two thresholds you must clear together, which is stricter than the directive and pushes people into obligations they do not have ^[8]. On the directive's own wording, a nine-person firm with EUR 5 million turnover and a EUR 1.8 million balance sheet total is exempt ^[9]. Two limits before you file the saving. The exemption covers microenterprises providing services and does not exempt microenterprises placing products on the market ^[10]. For most readers that is academic, since a website is a service and e-commerce services are explicitly in scope under Article 2(2), alongside consumer banking, e-books, passenger transport, electronic communications and audiovisual media access services ^[11]. But if you also manufacture, import or distribute self-service terminals, e-readers, or consumer terminal equipment with interactive computing capability, microenterprise status does not release you from the products half ^[12]. Separately, the EAA is a directive transposed into 27 national laws, and Member States had room to move ^[13]; national equality and anti-discrimination law is separate and generally older ^[14]; the ADA is a different question with an active litigation industry attached ^[15]; and public sector bodies and their suppliers sit under Directive 2016/2102, which is where the familiar five-heading statement template originates ^[16]. The sharper operational point is what not to do with the exemption. Publishing a conformity claim you never owed converts a non-obligation into a public, written, verifiable assertion about your own product, and the author's argument is that never having had to make it is not a defence if it is inaccurate ^[17]. He points to the FTC's 2025 action against accessiBe, which turned on claims: that the product made sites WCAG compliant, that it kept them compliant, and how the company's own promotional articles were presented ^[18]. He also reports fixing his own tool. The statement generator asserted compliance for anyone who clicked through, including people who owed nothing, until he added a microenterprise question ahead of everything else; it now stops asserting conformity, cites Article 4(5), and frames whatever you publish as voluntary ^[19]. None of this changes the users. The share of people who need captions, keyboard operation or sufficient contrast is exactly what it was before anyone read Article 4(5) ^[20], and the people who cannot complete your checkout are still not completing it ^[21].