The EU Accessibility Act

The feature was added to make it easier to comply with the EU Accessibility Act:

The EU Accessibility Act (EAA) goes into effect June 28, 2025, and applies to certain digital services offered to individual consumers in the EU. This affects Newspack publishers who are:

  • Based in the EU or sell to EU-based consumers, and
  • Offer subscriptions, memberships, donations, other products

If these conditions apply, publishers have to publish an accessibility statement on their site by June 28, 2025.

The accessibility statement should:

  • Describe the in-scope services (e.g., checkout),
  • State how the site meets WCAG 2.1 AA,
  • Be linked from the site footer, with a clear URL (e.g., /accessibility or /accessibility-statement).

Setting up an Accessibility Statement page in Newspack

No special functionality is actually needed to add an Accessibility Statement to a Newspack site – you can create content for an Accessibility Statement page using the W3’s guides and generator, and link it from the footer of your website.

However, we’ve added this feature to make it a bit easier to add an Accessibility Statement. It comes with a boilerplate Accessibility Statement that includes accessibility information about the Checkout Button Block, Donate Block, Modal Checkout, and regular Checkout. When an accessibility statement page is published using this feature, you’ll see a link to it at the very bottom of the footer, in line with the copyright and the Powered by Newspack link.

To use this feature:

  1. Navigate to WP Admin > Newspack > Settings > Advanced Settings.
  2. Scroll to the bottom, to the Accessibility Statement Page header.
  1. Click the “Edit and Publish Page” button to edit the Accessibility Statement. This will open the page editor for a draft version of the page.
  2. You’ll see boilerplate information about Newspack’s checkout functionality in the editor. You should remove or replace any information highlighted in yellow, and delete the instructions in gray at the top. We recommend using the W3’s guides for guidance. You should also verify all information is correct — for example, if your site uses CSS to change the color of elements in the checkout, they may no longer meet the contrast requirements. In that case, you should remove the CSS, or update the Accessibility Statement.
  3. If you like, you can change the page’s name and slug (the URL it will use).
  4. Once you’re done, publish your Accessibility Statement page.
  5. Once published, a link to your accessibility statement will appear at the bottom of your website:
  1. If you delete the Accessibility Statement page at any point, it will no longer appear in the footer. If you go to Newspack > Settings > Advanced Settings, after that, it will give you an option to create a new draft page, but it will no longer do it automatically:
  1. To make future edits to the page, you can go to Newspack > Settings > Advanced Settings and click the Edit Page button next to the Accessibility Statement Page header. You can also find the page in the WP Admin > Pages list by looking for the Accessibility Statement post status next to the page name:

One purpose of the Accessibility Statement is to have a space for readers to share feedback about a site’s accessibility. If you receive feedback that you’d like to share with us, please share it in the #newspack-help channel.

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