Bulgaria

Bulgaria's digital-accessibility regime is the product of two European Union directives transposed onto a much older domestic foundation. Public-sector websites have been on the hook since 2018, when Articles 58a–58c of the Law on Electronic Governance (Закон за електронното управление) turned Directive (EU) 2016/2102 into Bulgarian law. Private-sector products and services followed in 2024, when amendments to the Persons with Disabilities Act (Закон за хората с увреждания) transposed Directive (EU) 2019/882 (the European Accessibility Act) under the just-inside deadline of 28 June 2025. Beneath both sits a constitutional anchor older than the EU itself.

The constitutional and treaty floor

The 1991 Constitution of the Republic of Bulgaria places persons with disabilities under "the special protection of the State and society" (Article 51, paragraph 3 — "Лицата с физически и психически увреждания се намират под особената закрила на държавата и обществото"). That clause has been treated by the Constitutional Court as a positive obligation on the State rather than a purely programmatic statement, and is invoked routinely in administrative-court appeals of penalty decisions under the disability-rights statutes.

Bulgaria ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities by act of the National Assembly on 22 March 2012; the convention entered into force for Bulgaria on 21 April 2012, and the Optional Protocol was ratified together with the convention itself. Article 9 of the CRPD (accessibility) and Article 33 (national implementation and monitoring) are the international-law instruments most frequently cited in Bulgarian accessibility policy documents. The CRPD Committee's Concluding Observations on Bulgaria's Initial Report flagged inclusive education, accessibility of the built environment, and digital-services accessibility as areas requiring sustained policy attention — themes that the 2024 EAA-transposing amendments and the National Strategy for People with Disabilities 2025–2030 explicitly answer.

Public-sector accessibility: the WAD path via ZEU

Directive (EU) 2016/2102 — the Web Accessibility Directive (WAD) — was transposed into Bulgarian law through amendments to the Law on Electronic Governance (Закон за електронното управление, ZEU) that added Articles 58a–58c to the act. The transposition was completed in 2018, just inside the 23 September 2018 EU deadline. The amendments oblige every public-sector body in Bulgaria — central administration, municipalities, state-funded universities, hospitals run by public bodies, and the publicly-owned enterprises in the EU's expanded definition of "public sector body" — to make their websites and mobile applications conform to the technical standard set out in Article 58a.

Three concrete obligations follow from those three articles:

• Conformance. Websites and mobile applications must conform to the harmonised European standard EN 301 549 (currently v3.2.1, the version that integrates WCAG 2.1 Level AA). The national implementation methodology, published by the Ministry of e-Government, fixes the conformance bar at WCAG 2.1 AA pending the formal update of EN 301 549 to track WCAG 2.2.
• Accessibility statement. Each in-scope body must publish, in Bulgarian, a structured accessibility statement covering conformance status, content that falls outside the directive's scope (third-party widgets, legacy office documents predating September 2018, archived recordings), and a complaint mechanism. The statement must be machine-readable and is filed into the national registry maintained by the Ministry of e-Government.
• Feedback and enforcement procedure. Users must be able to submit accessibility complaints to the in-scope body. Unresolved complaints can be escalated to the Ministry of e-Government, which acts as the national enforcement body for WAD.

The supervising regulator is the Ministry of e-Government (Министерство на електронното управление, MeU) — the dedicated ministry carved out of the Ministry of Transport, Information Technology and Communications in June 2022. Before the MeU's creation, the supervisory role sat with the State Agency for E-Governance (Държавна агенция "Електронно управление", DAEU), and the institutional handover took most of 2023 to operationalise. The MeU now runs the periodic monitoring rounds required by Commission Decision (EU) 2018/1523 (the methodology decision), publishing simplified-scan and in-depth-scan results into the national accessibility-statement registry.

The European Commission opened an infringement procedure against Bulgaria in 2022 on the grounds of incomplete WAD transposition and underdeveloped enforcement infrastructure. The procedure was closed in 2024 after follow-up amendments to ZEU and the publication of a revised national monitoring methodology aligned to the Commission's expectations. Bulgaria is now among the EU member states routinely included in the Commission's biennial WAD implementation review without an open finding.

Private-sector accessibility: the EAA path via ZHU

The European Accessibility Act — Directive (EU) 2019/882 — was transposed into Bulgarian law not as a stand-alone statute but as a substantial set of amendments to the Persons with Disabilities Act (Закон за хората с увреждания, ZHU). The transposition act was adopted in late 2024, the secondary legislation (Council of Ministers ordinances on technical conformance and market-surveillance procedure) followed in the first half of 2025, and the substantive obligations on businesses took effect on the EU-wide application date of 28 June 2025.

The EAA-amended ZHU covers the directive's full product and service scope:

• Products: computer hardware and operating systems, self-service terminals (ATMs, ticket machines, check-in kiosks), consumer terminal equipment with interactive computing capability used to access audiovisual media services, consumer terminal equipment used for electronic communications services, and e-readers.
• Services: electronic communications services, services providing access to audiovisual media services, elements of air-, bus-, rail- and waterborne passenger-transport services, consumer banking services, e-books and dedicated software, and e-commerce services.

The act borrows the directive's micro-enterprise carve-out: businesses with fewer than 10 employees and an annual turnover or balance-sheet total not exceeding €2 million are exempt from the service-side obligations (but not from the product-side obligations, which run on the manufacturer-rather-than-employer test). The transitional period for terminals already in use on 28 June 2025 extends until 28 June 2045 or until the terminal's economically-useful end of life, whichever comes first — a long tail by design, calibrated to the depreciation cycle of bank-branch ATMs and transport-network ticket machines.

The market-surveillance authority is the Agency for People with Disabilities (Агенция за хората с увреждания, APD / АХУ) operating under the Minister of Labour and Social Policy. The APD hosts a dedicated EAA market-surveillance department, cooperates with the State Agency for Metrology and Technical Surveillance (DAMTN) on product categories that overlap with the general product-safety framework, and coordinates with sectoral regulators on the service side (the Bulgarian National Bank for consumer banking, the Communications Regulation Commission for electronic communications, the Council for Electronic Media for audiovisual services). Cross-border market surveillance follows the procedures set out in EU Regulation (EU) 2019/1020 and is coordinated through the EU's Information and Communication System on Market Surveillance (ICSMS).

The cross-cutting backstop: the Anti-Discrimination Act

The Anti-Discrimination Act (Закон за защита от дискриминация, ZZD) — in force since 1 January 2004 — recognises disability as a protected characteristic and prohibits both direct and indirect discrimination, harassment, and the failure to provide reasonable accommodation. The act creates an independent quasi-judicial body, the Commission for Protection against Discrimination (Комисия за защита от дискриминация, KZD), with the authority to investigate complaints, hold hearings, and impose administrative sanctions.

The KZD has built a steady caseload of digital-accessibility complaints over the last decade. Decisions involving inaccessible online-banking services, inaccessible municipal-administration portals, and inaccessible e-commerce checkouts have been issued in the BGN 1,000–5,000 administrative-fine band, with parallel orders requiring the respondent to remedy the inaccessibility within a fixed period. Failure to comply with a remedial order is itself a fresh administrative offence under ZZD. The Commission's decisions are appealable to the administrative courts and ultimately to the Supreme Administrative Court (Върховен административен съд, VAS), which has in recent years generally upheld the Commission's findings while occasionally reducing the fine.

Complainants in ZZD proceedings may also pursue parallel civil claims in the general courts for material and non-material (moral) damages. There is no statutory cap on non-material damages; awards in disability-discrimination cases have typically fallen in the BGN 500–10,000 range, with the higher end reserved for cases involving repeated refusals or severe consequences. Civil and KZD proceedings can run in parallel — the existence of one does not bar the other.

Technical standards and conformance

The conformance bar across the public-sector (WAD) and private-sector (EAA) tracks is anchored on the same EU harmonised standard, EN 301 549, currently in force at version 3.2.1. EN 301 549 imports WCAG 2.1 Level AA as its baseline web-content conformance requirement and adds additional requirements specific to mobile applications, native software, non-web documents, hardware, and communications functionality. The standard's update to integrate WCAG 2.2 is in progress at ETSI and CEN-CENELEC; once published, the Ministry of e-Government's monitoring methodology and the APD's market-surveillance guidance are both expected to track the new version on a transitional schedule.

The 2024 Council of Ministers ordinance on accessibility of ICT products and services, adopted as secondary legislation under the EAA-amended ZHU, sets out the conformity-assessment procedures, the form of the EU Declaration of Conformity required for in-scope products, the technical-file requirements, the CE-marking interaction, and the language regime (declarations may be issued in Bulgarian or in English, with a Bulgarian translation provided on request).

For accessibility statements — required under both WAD (ZEU Art. 58b) and the EAA-amended ZHU — the Commission's Implementing Decision (EU) 2018/1523 model is followed verbatim in the public-sector context. The private-sector accessibility-information requirement under the EAA is lighter: a structured "information for consumers" notice, in plain language, covering how the product or service was made accessible, where to direct accessibility complaints, and which conformance standard was used as a basis.

Penalties — the full exposure stack

A common error in compliance budgeting is to read the administrative-fine table in isolation and conclude that accessibility violations in Bulgaria are cheap. They are not. The administrative-fine column is the floor of a five-layer exposure stack: (1) administrative fines under the four statutes; (2) civil discrimination damages, uncapped under Bulgarian tort law; (3) public-procurement disqualification, with bid-revenue implications that often dwarf the fine itself; (4) consumer-protection / class-action exposure under the general civil-procedure framework; and (5) EU Commission infringement procedures against the Bulgarian state for systemic non-implementation, which sit outside the national regime entirely but flow back as policy pressure on the national regulators to enforce harder. Below, all figures are presented in euros (the statutes are denominated in BGN at the locked 1.95583 conversion rate; Bulgaria's planned euro adoption from 1 January 2026 redenominates the underlying BGN figures without changing their economic value).

Layer 1 — administrative fines under the four statutes

The EAA's Article 30 obliges every member state to set penalties that are "effective, proportionate, and dissuasive" — language the European Court of Justice has interpreted to require maxima sufficient to alter the cost-benefit calculation of large operators, not just nominal fines that get treated as a cost of doing business. The WAD's Article 9 imposes the same proportionality test on the public-sector side. The Bulgarian transposition implements both through tiered administrative-fine provisions in the four core statutes, with the upper tiers reserved for repeated or systemic violations.

Bulgaria's "very serious" tier ceiling sits at the lower end of the EU-wide spread. By way of comparison: Germany's BFSG §37 caps single-incident fines at €100,000; France's 2023 transposition ordinance allows administrative fines up to €50,000 per non-conforming product, with per-day penalties for ongoing non-compliance; Spain's Ley 11/2023 sets a graduated framework reaching €1,000,000 for "very serious" infringements; Italy's transposition (D.Lgs. 82/2022) caps at €40,000; and the Netherlands has signalled exposure of up to 5% of annual turnover for systemic violations. The Bulgarian figures published so far track the lower end of the EU range — a reflection both of the comparatively lower price level in Bulgaria and of the regulator's stated preference for corrective-action orders over high one-off fines, at least in the first surveillance cycle.

Layer 2 — civil discrimination damages (uncapped)

Beyond the administrative-fine track, complainants under the Anti-Discrimination Act may pursue parallel civil claims in the general courts for both material and non-material (moral) damages. Bulgarian tort law sets no statutory cap on non-material damages — the courts assess them by reference to the severity of the breach, the duration of the discriminatory conduct, the size and resources of the respondent, and the broader public-interest implications of the case. Awards in disability-discrimination cases over the last decade have typically fallen in the €250–€5,000 range per claimant, with a small number of high-profile cases reaching €10,000–€25,000 where the discriminatory effect on a class of users was well-documented. The civil-court route is the higher-exposure pathway for cases involving named individual claimants, especially where multiple complainants can be joined under the Bulgarian civil-procedure rules on related claims.

Layer 3 — public-procurement disqualification

The Bulgarian Public Procurement Act (Закон за обществените поръчки, ZOP), transposing the EU Procurement Directives, requires contracting authorities to consider accessibility from the technical-specification stage onward and allows for disqualification of bidders that have been found to have committed serious professional misconduct — a category that includes adjudicated accessibility-related discrimination decisions and significant administrative-penalty findings under ZHU. For vendors selling into the Bulgarian public sector, the loss of bid eligibility on an active procurement (typical contract values run €500,000 to several million euros) routinely exceeds the administrative fine that triggered the disqualification by one to two orders of magnitude.

Layer 4 — consumer-protection and class exposure

Bulgaria does not yet have a US-style accessibility class-action regime, but the general Bulgarian civil-procedure framework (Граждански процесуален кодекс, GPK) permits collective claims under Articles 379–388 for the protection of consumer interests. A digital service that systematically excludes a class of users with disabilities can give rise to a collective claim brought by a consumer-protection association on behalf of affected consumers, with damages assessed on a per-claimant basis and added together. Awards under this route remain rare in Bulgarian practice but are increasingly invoked in EU member states with comparable procedural frameworks, and the Bulgarian Consumer Protection Commission (Комисия за защита на потребителите, KZP) has taken an interest in digital-services accessibility since 2024.

Layer 5 — EU Commission infringement procedures (state-level)

The largest exposure number in the EU accessibility landscape is not a fine on a business — it is the lump-sum and daily penalty the Court of Justice of the European Union can impose on a member state under Article 260(2) TFEU for failing to transpose or enforce an EU directive. The 2025 Commission communication on financial sanctions sets the indicative minimum lump-sum payment for failure to comply with a previous CJEU judgment at €1,176,000 for Bulgaria, with daily penalty payments calculated from a base of approximately €1,000–€7,000 per day multiplied by severity and duration coefficients. The Commission's 2022 infringement procedure against Bulgaria for incomplete WAD transposition (closed in 2024) is the most recent example; an EAA-related procedure remains a credible 2026–28 risk for any member state where the national enforcement infrastructure lags. The pressure of an open Commission infringement procedure routinely produces a step-change in how aggressively the national regulator uses its existing administrative-fine powers.

Enforcement record and outlook

Public-sector enforcement under ZEU has been steady but not particularly aggressive: the Ministry of e-Government's monitoring methodology produces twice-yearly simplified scans of about 8,000 in-scope websites and a smaller in-depth-scan tranche of ~80 sites per cycle. Findings of non-conformance trigger remedial-action orders in the first instance, with administrative penalties reserved for repeat offenders or for cases where the public-sector body refuses to engage. The first cohort of WAD penalty decisions appealed to the administrative courts (2023–2024) has so far produced a roughly even split between full upholding and partial reduction of the fine.

Private-sector enforcement under the EAA-amended ZHU started only on 28 June 2025 and is still in its first surveillance cycle as of mid-2026. The APD's market-surveillance programme prioritises (per its published 2025–2026 work plan): banking-app accessibility, e-commerce checkout accessibility, self-service ticketing kiosks at major transport hubs, and e-book reader devices and software placed on the Bulgarian market. The first round of administrative-penalty decisions under the EAA-amended provisions is expected through the second half of 2026; current expectation in the regulatory community is that the APD will give regulated entities a short formal grace period (typically a 60-day corrective-action window) before assessing penalties, except in cases of egregious or repeated non-compliance.

The KZD's caseload on digital-inaccessibility-as-discrimination has been the most active enforcement strand of the three for the last decade. Decisions in 2024 and 2025 against major Bulgarian retail banks, two municipal-administration portals, and a national online-pharmacy platform are now in the appeal phase before the administrative courts. The general pattern is that the KZD's substantive findings of discrimination are upheld more often than not, with the courts intervening primarily on the proportionality of the administrative fine and on the question of how rapidly the respondent must remedy the inaccessibility.

What's coming in 2026–27

Three concrete developments to watch. First, the Council of Ministers' secondary legislation under the EAA-amended ZHU is being operationalised through 2026: detailed technical-file content requirements, the form of the EU Declaration of Conformity for in-scope products, and the procedure for designating notified bodies under the EAA's conformity-assessment regime. Second, the Ministry of e-Government has announced (May 2025) an updated national accessibility methodology designed to align Bulgaria's WAD monitoring with WCAG 2.2 once EN 301 549 formally tracks the new version. Third, Bulgaria's adoption of the euro on 1 January 2026 will require a coordinated republication of all administrative-fine figures across the four core statutes; the locked conversion rate ensures economic continuity, but the headline numbers will change visibly.

On the international-monitoring side, Bulgaria's next periodic report to the CRPD Committee is due in 2027, and accessibility implementation under both the WAD and the EAA pathways will feature prominently in the next round of Concluding Observations. The 2025–2030 National Strategy for People with Disabilities, adopted in early 2025, is the policy document that lines up the implementation pathway across all three administrations (MeU, APD, KZD) and against which the CRPD review will measure progress.