European Web Accessibility Directive (WAD) tries to improve the digital accessibility of public sector throughout Europe. Finland went even further and decided to include some parts of private sector as well – insurances, banks and some other vital parts of private sector in Finland are required to conform to WAD (opens in new window, Google translate). Norway already had the legislation that requires private sector’s digital surfaces in Norway to conform to WCAG 2.0 on level AA (opens in new window). So let’s assume that this is quite a positive addition to state of accessibility in Europe. But personally I was surprised that other critical online services were not included from start.
The European Accessibility Act (EAA) (opens in new window) – was adopted by European Union in 2019 and is a directive (I know, confusing, I thought it was an act) that will try to fulfill my wish about banks and online shopping. We are still in the pandemics at the time I am writing this and I think that EAA timeline is even more unfortunate because of it but I also understand that they had to make a lot compromises and that this will have positive impacts on longer run. I am not a politician but this is a good example of how accessibility really is political as well.
European Accessibility Act as a wake-up call for online banking and e-commerce
Some banks found out early that they need to invest in accessibility and those are exceptions but there are multiple online banks in Europe that are quite obviously falling back. I guess the main reason for them is that accessibility is still not a part of compliance and that they have to use more and more money and resources on other compliance related tasks. They have to deal with General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that was enforced in 2018, Payment Services Directive number 2 (PSD2) that came in 2019, Anti Money Laundering (AML) directives from 2021 and so on. To be able to stay in business they need to invest in compliance. And EAA will again come as a part of compliance for some of them. On the other hand we also have banks that are aware of the positive effects of accessibility on their customer base, loyalty, sometimes even advocacy that started to renew their digital surfaces and make them more accessible pro-actively. I am sure that others will follow because of the compliance risks but I need to congratulate the banks that are working on accessibility long before it will be kind of forced upon them.
Similar story can be seen in the e-commerce business. But the similarity ceases to exist for all the “micro” online shops that are investing only in marketing or maybe not even that. Selling things online is a matter of some hours. Setting up a business that sells online is a matter of days if one has to register a new company. So this sector is a bit special, extremely segmented and diverse. There are people that are store owners only part time, families selling their farm products, small companies, medium companies, corporations and so on. Some of them use hosted platforms, some of them use home made WordPress shops made with some plugins, some of them bought “white label” shops and some of them even invested in their own platform from scratch. This therefore means that they will have to deal with accessibility requirements in different ways. Some will probably just switch to a provider that can promise them compliance, some may go out of business, some may just buy themes and plugins that will be accessible, some will have to engage developers, designers and other that will fix the bugs after some audits and so on. I am curious how this will be in practice and how will the “magic overlay” providers try to get their piece of cake. At the same time I may expect some other solutions based on machine learning and artificial intelligence that will try to fix issues from inside out (for example plugins that will actually try to fix some problems in the code or maybe just trying to automatically add alternative texts to hundreds or thousands of products).
As we can think – EAA will definitely bring some additional complications to owners and I really hope make a large part of the web services much more accessible. I just hope that end users will not be the only ones that will have to pay for getting their services accessible as they should be accessible from the start!
How much time do they have
As with all directives it takes time from “approval” to “in effect”. As far as I can tell the plan is to adopt and translate EAA by 2022 and then it will have to be enforced by 2025. These dates may be changed but if we suppose they will remain it means that users throughout Europe will have much more accessible banking and online shopping experiences by 2026.
For banks and online stores it means that they should really do something about it as soon as possible, ideally last year.
The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.
Chinese proverb that perfectly suits your accessibility efforts as well.
