Slovakia

Slovakia's digital-accessibility regime is the product of two EU directives transposed onto a constitutional and equality-law foundation that predates EU accession. Public-sector websites have been on the hook since 2019, when Act No. 95/2019 Z. z. (Zákon o informačných technológiách vo verejnej správe) turned Directive (EU) 2016/2102 into Slovak law. Private-sector products and services followed in 2023, when Act No. 71/2023 Z. z. transposed Directive (EU) 2019/882 (the European Accessibility Act) with substantive obligations applying from 28 June 2025. Beneath both sits the Anti-Discrimination Act of 2004 and the constitutional equality clause of Article 12.

The constitutional and treaty floor

The 1992 Constitution anchors disability-rights protection in two clauses. Article 12 guarantees that "all are free and equal in dignity and in rights" and prohibits restriction of fundamental rights on grounds including "health condition" (zdravotný stav) — the constitutional formulation under which disability discrimination is cognisable. Article 38 entitles persons with health disabilities to enhanced protection of health at work and special working conditions. The Constitutional Court has treated both as imposing positive obligations on the State and they are invoked routinely in administrative-court appeals of penalty decisions under the accessibility statutes.

Slovakia ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and its Optional Protocol on 26 May 2010; the Convention entered into force for Slovakia on 25 June 2010. The CRPD Committee's Concluding Observations of March 2023 flagged deinstitutionalisation, built-environment accessibility, inclusive education, and digital-services accessibility as priority concerns — themes that line up with the National Programme for the Development of Living Conditions of Persons with Disabilities 2021–2030.

Slovak Sign Language (slovenský posunkový jazyk, SPJ) is recognised by Act No. 149/1995 Z. z. on Sign Language of the Deaf as the natural language of the Slovak deaf community, with rights to use SPJ in official proceedings and to interpretation in education and public services — a foundational accessibility provision predating the EU's WAD and EAA frameworks by a quarter century.

Public-sector accessibility: the WAD path via Act 95/2019

Directive (EU) 2016/2102 — the Web Accessibility Directive (WAD) — was transposed into Slovak law through the Act on Information Technologies in Public Administration (Zákon č. 95/2019 Z. z., ZoITVS), in force from 1 May 2019. The WAD-specific provisions sit in §14 (accessibility) and §15 (accessibility statement and feedback), with technical detail in the implementing Decree of MIRRI No. 547/2021 Z. z. Slovakia was several months late on the September 2018 transposition deadline and received a Commission letter of formal notice in early 2019, which closed once the act took effect.

The act obliges every Slovak public-sector body — central administration, self-governing regions (samosprávne kraje), municipalities, state-funded universities, public hospitals, and publicly-owned enterprises within the EU's expanded "public sector body" definition — to make websites and mobile applications conform to the standard. Three concrete obligations follow:

• Conformance to the harmonised European standard EN 301 549 (v3.2.1, which integrates WCAG 2.1 Level AA). MIRRI's methodology fixes the bar at WCAG 2.1 AA pending the EN 301 549 update to WCAG 2.2.
• Accessibility statement in Slovak — machine-readable, covering conformance status, out-of-scope content, and a complaint mechanism — filed into the national registry maintained by MIRRI.
• Feedback and enforcement procedure. Users can submit complaints to the in-scope body; unresolved complaints escalate to MIRRI as the national enforcement body for WAD.

The supervising regulator is the Ministry of Investments, Regional Development and Informatisation (Ministerstvo investícií, regionálneho rozvoja a informatizácie SR, MIRRI) — created by Act 134/2020 in July 2020 to consolidate eGovernment, informatisation, and EU-funds remits. MIRRI runs the periodic monitoring rounds required by Commission Decision (EU) 2018/1523 and publishes simplified-scan and in-depth-scan results into the national registry. The first national monitoring report was published in December 2021; subsequent reports follow the EU's three-year cadence. The Commission's Article 8 reports have flagged Slovakia for slow rollout of the monitoring methodology and uneven publication of statements across municipal websites, but no formal Article 258 TFEU infringement procedure is open on WAD grounds as of mid-2026.

Private-sector accessibility: the EAA path via Act 71/2023

The European Accessibility Act — Directive (EU) 2019/882 — was transposed into Slovak law as a stand-alone statute: Act No. 71/2023 Z. z. on the Accessibility of Products and Services for Persons with Disabilities (Zákon č. 71/2023 Z. z. o prístupnosti výrobkov a služieb pre osoby so zdravotným postihnutím). The act entered into force on 1 April 2023, with substantive obligations on economic operators applying from the EU-wide date of 28 June 2025. The stand-alone vehicle — rather than amending an existing statute, as Bulgaria did — gives the Slovak regime a unified statutory home for EAA obligations, conformity assessment, market surveillance, and penalties.

Act 71/2023 covers the directive's full scope:

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

The act adopts the directive's micro-enterprise carve-out: businesses with fewer than 10 employees and annual turnover or balance-sheet total not exceeding €2 million are exempt from service-side obligations (but not product-side, which run on the manufacturer test). The transitional period for self-service terminals already in use on 28 June 2025 extends until 28 June 2045 or end of useful life. Service contracts concluded before 28 June 2025 may continue until they expire or until 28 June 2030.

The market-surveillance authority is the Slovak Trade Inspection (Slovenská obchodná inšpekcia, SOI), the established consumer-protection and product-safety inspectorate under the Ministry of Economy. SOI's designation builds on its existing infrastructure under Regulation (EU) 2019/1020 and integrates accessibility into the inspectorate's risk-based programme. Cross-border surveillance is coordinated through the EU's ICSMS. SOI cooperates with the National Bank of Slovakia (Národná banka Slovenska) on consumer banking, with the Regulatory Authority for Electronic Communications and Postal Services (RÚ) on telecoms, and with the Council for Media Services on audiovisual services.

The cross-cutting backstop: the Anti-Discrimination Act

The Anti-Discrimination Act (Zákon č. 365/2004 Z. z., the antidiskriminačný zákon) — in force since 1 July 2004 — recognises disability as a protected characteristic and prohibits direct and indirect discrimination, harassment, and failure to provide reasonable accommodation. It designates the Slovak National Centre for Human Rights (Slovenské národné stredisko pre ľudské práva, SNSĽP) as the national equality body, with mandates to receive complaints, issue opinions, conduct research, and support civil-court claimants.

Unlike Bulgaria's KZD, the SNSĽP is not a quasi-judicial body empowered to impose administrative sanctions directly. The enforcement pathway is the civil courts: a complainant sues for declaration of discrimination, cessation, restoration, and compensation of material and non-material (moral) damages. Slovak courts have built a steady caseload of disability-discrimination decisions over two decades, including a growing line on digital-inaccessibility-as-discrimination involving online-banking, municipal e-services, and consumer e-commerce. The Public Defender of Rights (Verejný ochranca práv, VOP) and the Commissioner for Persons with Disabilities (KOZP, Act 176/2015) operate alongside SNSĽP as Slovakia's CRPD Article 33 monitoring framework; the VOP's 2022 and 2024 thematic reports both examined digital-services accessibility in Slovak public administration.

Technical standards and conformance

The conformance bar across both tracks is anchored on EN 301 549 (v3.2.1), which imports WCAG 2.1 Level AA and adds requirements for mobile applications, native software, non-web documents, hardware, and communications. The update to integrate WCAG 2.2 is in progress at ETSI and CEN-CENELEC; MIRRI's methodology and SOI's surveillance guidance are both expected to track the new version on a transitional schedule.

Decree of MIRRI No. 547/2021 Z. z. sets out the WAD technical requirements, including the accessibility-statement template (following Commission Implementing Decision (EU) 2018/1523) and the documentation requirements. For Act 71/2023, the Ministry of Economy's implementing regulations set out the conformity-assessment procedures, the EU Declaration of Conformity, the technical-file requirements, and the procedure for designating notified bodies. Declarations may be in Slovak or English, with a Slovak translation on SOI request. The EAA's accessibility-information requirement is lighter than the WAD's structured statement: a plain-Slovak "information for consumers" notice.

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 Slovakia are cheap. They are not. The administrative-fine column is the floor of a five-layer exposure stack: (1) administrative fines under Act 71/2023 and Act 95/2019; (2) civil discrimination damages under Act 365/2004, uncapped under Slovak tort law; (3) public-procurement disqualification under Act 343/2015, with bid-revenue implications that dwarf the fine itself; (4) consumer-protection and collective-redress exposure; and (5) EU Commission infringement procedures against the Slovak state. All figures below are in euros — Slovakia adopted the euro on 1 January 2009, so the statutory denomination is already EUR throughout.

Layer 1 — administrative fines under the accessibility statutes

The EAA's Article 30 obliges member states to set penalties that are "effective, proportionate, and dissuasive" — language interpreted by the ECJ to require maxima sufficient to alter the cost-benefit calculation of large operators. The WAD's Article 9 imposes the same proportionality test on the public-sector side. The Slovak transposition implements both through tiered administrative-fine provisions in Act 71/2023 (the headline EAA penalty regime) and the general administrative-offence framework under Act 95/2019.

Slovakia's "very serious" tier ceiling — €100,000 or 5% of annual turnover — sits in the upper half of the EU-wide spread. By way of comparison: Germany's BFSG §37 caps single-incident fines at €100,000; France's 2023 ordinance allows up to €50,000 per non-conforming product with per-day penalties; Spain's Ley 11/2023 reaches €1,000,000 for "very serious" infringements; Italy's D.Lgs. 82/2022 caps at €40,000; the Netherlands has signalled exposure of up to 5% of annual turnover — the same turnover-linked maximum that Slovakia adopted.

Layer 2 — civil discrimination damages (uncapped)

Complainants under the Anti-Discrimination Act may pursue civil claims for material and non-material (moral) damages, which are uncapped under Slovak tort law. Awards in disability-discrimination cases have typically fallen in the €500–€5,000 range per claimant, with a small number of high-profile cases reaching €10,000–€30,000 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 claims can be joined under the Slovak Civil Disputes Procedure Code (Civilný sporový poriadok, Act 160/2015).

Layer 3 — public-procurement disqualification

The Slovak Public Procurement Act (Zákon č. 343/2015 Z. z. o verejnom obstarávaní) requires contracting authorities to consider accessibility from the technical-specification stage onward and allows for disqualification of bidders that have committed serious professional misconduct — a category that includes adjudicated accessibility-related discrimination decisions and significant administrative-penalty findings under Act 71/2023. For vendors selling into the Slovak public sector, loss of bid eligibility on an active procurement (typical contract values €300,000 to several million euros) routinely exceeds the triggering fine by one to two orders of magnitude. The Office for Public Procurement (ÚVO) maintains the debarred-supplier register.

Layer 4 — consumer-protection and collective-redress exposure

Slovakia transposed the EU Representative Actions Directive (2020/1828) through Act No. 261/2024 Z. z. Authorised consumer-protection organisations can now bring representative actions for injunctive measures and redress on behalf of affected consumers — including where a digital service systematically excludes a class of users with disabilities. Awards under this route remain rare in the first months of operation, but the procedural framework is in place and SOI's enforcement actions produce the evidentiary record that representative-action claimants will increasingly rely on.

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

The largest exposure number in the EU accessibility landscape is the lump-sum and daily penalty the CJEU can impose on a member state under Article 260(2) TFEU. The 2025 Commission communication sets the indicative minimum lump-sum payment for failure to comply with a previous CJEU judgment at approximately €1,800,000 for Slovakia, with daily penalty payments from a base of roughly €2,000–€11,000 per day multiplied by severity and duration coefficients. An EAA-related procedure remains a credible 2026–28 risk for any member state where national enforcement lags — and the pressure of an open procedure routinely produces a step-change in how aggressively the national regulator uses its existing powers.

Enforcement record and outlook

Public-sector enforcement under Act 95/2019 has been steady but not aggressive: MIRRI's monitoring methodology produces simplified scans of several thousand in-scope websites and a smaller in-depth-scan tranche per cycle. Non-conformance findings trigger remedial-action orders first, with administrative penalties reserved for repeat offenders. The Public Defender of Rights' 2022 and 2024 reports both criticised the pace of remediation across municipal websites — a recurring finding that has put political pressure on MIRRI to use its penalty powers more visibly through 2026.

Private-sector enforcement under Act 71/2023 started on 28 June 2025 and is in its first surveillance cycle as of mid-2026. SOI's published 2025–2026 work plan prioritises 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 Slovak market. The first administrative-penalty decisions are expected in the second half of 2026; the regulatory community expects SOI to give entities a short formal grace period (typically 60 days) before assessing penalties, except for egregious or repeated cases.

The civil-court route under Act 365/2004 has been the most consistent enforcement strand for individual complainants for two decades. Decisions in 2024 and 2025 against a major Slovak retail bank, a national e-commerce platform, and a municipality's e-services portal are now in the appeal phase before the regional courts. The courts uphold substantive findings of disability discrimination more often than not, with intervention primarily on the proportionality of the moral-damages award.

What's coming in 2026–27

Three concrete developments to watch. First, the Ministry of Economy's secondary legislation under Act 71/2023 is being operationalised through 2026: detailed technical-file requirements, the form of the EU Declaration of Conformity, and the procedure for designating notified bodies. Second, MIRRI has signalled an updated national accessibility methodology designed to align WAD monitoring with WCAG 2.2 once EN 301 549 formally tracks the new version. Third, the National Programme 2021–2030 enters its mid-term review in 2026, with the CRPD Article 33 monitoring bodies (SNSĽP, VOP, KOZP) all expected to contribute thematic reports on accessibility implementation.

Slovakia's next periodic report to the CRPD Committee is due in 2027, and accessibility implementation under both the WAD and EAA pathways will feature prominently in the next round of Concluding Observations. The Committee's March 2023 observations already flagged digital-services accessibility — the 2027 review will measure progress against that baseline.