Finland accessibility law: Digipalvelulaki explained

Who has to comply

Public-sector since 2019; consumer services from 28 June 2025.

Finland is a small, bilingual (Finnish and Swedish) market with very high digital-service adoption. A foreign store selling to Finnish consumers is covered under the EAA-laki on the country-of-consumption basis. The practical catch for cross-border sellers is the bilingual expectation: where a service operates in both Finnish and Swedish, the accessibility statement is expected in both, and foreign sellers who localise only into English can find their statement treated as inadequate.

What the law actually requires

The technical baseline is WCAG 2.1 Level AA via EN 301 549. EN 301 549 references WCAG 2.1 Level AA in full and adds a few requirements specific to mobile apps and documents. Beyond the technical bar, Finland requires the following operational items, which auditors check first because they are simple to verify:

• EN 301 549 / WCAG 2.1 AA

• Bilingual statement (Finnish + Swedish) for services in both languages

• Feedback channel with response within a reasonable time

Penalties and how enforcement actually works

Periodic penalty payments; AVI may publish enforcement decisions.

Finland concentrates enforcement in a single regional authority, the Regional State Administrative Agency for Southern Finland (Etelä-Suomen aluehallintovirasto, AVI), which has supervised the public-sector regime since 2019 and now extends to covered private services. AVI's approach is complaint- and assessment-driven, and it may publish its enforcement decisions, adding a transparency dimension. It can impose periodic penalty payments to compel remediation, so the pressure is coercive-conditional (comply or the penalty recurs) rather than a one-off fixed fine.

Practical first steps for a Finland site

If you are starting now and want to land before enforcement, run an automated audit, fix the high-impact issues (contrast, labels, keyboard, focus), publish an accessibility statement, and set up a feedback inbox. That sequence covers 80% of what auditors look for in a first sweep.

• Run a baseline scan to know your current score

• Fix critical and serious issues in priority order — these are the ones cited in complaints

• Publish a public accessibility statement on a stable URL (Finland regulators expect this discoverable)

• Add a feedback channel and answer within the country-specified window

• Re-scan after every major release; track regressions