Latvia accessibility law: CR 445/2020 + EAA explained

Who has to comply

Public-sector since 2020; consumer services from 28 June 2025.

Latvia is a small Baltic market with high digital-service adoption, and cross-border sellers targeting the Baltic region routinely reach Latvian consumers. Under the EAA-implementing legislation extending Cabinet Regulation 445/2020, a foreign store selling to Latvian consumers is covered on the country-of-consumption basis. A Latvian-language accessibility statement is expected, and it is a distinct requirement from any Lithuanian or Estonian localisation a regional seller may have prepared.

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, Latvia requires the following operational items, which auditors check first because they are simple to verify:

• EN 301 549 / WCAG 2.1 AA

• Latvian-language statement

Penalties and how enforcement actually works

Administrative penalties; VARAM publishes monitoring results.

Enforcement sits with VARAM, the Ministry of Environmental Protection and Regional Development, which administers the accessibility regime and publishes monitoring results. Latvia's model is transparency-inflected: VARAM's practice of publishing monitoring outcomes means a foreign seller's shortcomings can become publicly visible. Enforcement is otherwise centralised and largely complaint- and sampling-driven, with administrative penalties, and the published results give early-cycle attention to clearly measurable failures.

Practical first steps for a Latvia 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 (Latvia regulators expect this discoverable)

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

• Re-scan after every major release; track regressions