The 23rd of September is quite an important date for digital accessibility in European Union (EU), especially for public sector websites and mobile applications, not to mention people benefiting from accessible digital services, all of us actually.
Web Accessibility Directive (WAD) was namely put into practice two years ago. With WAD EU took quite an important step towards better digital inclusion, unfortunately limited only for public sector. At least for now, before European Accessibility Act (EAA) will expand some requirements.
Personally I’ve tried to follow the effects of it, and as it’s still a state of union, multiple countries with small differences, I think I managed to get quite an objective insight on the matter. First official reports of WAD were very useful reading and I am really looking forward to read the second one when it’s published.
Unfortunately it’s obvious that public sector wasn’t able to make their digital services totally accessible. It’s unfortunately not so strange, especially for small, independent parts of it. But it can also be frustrating that some critical new services weren’t made with accessibility in mind. I will not expose countries or organs, but it’s quite obvious that WAD is still not regarded as a serious part of their deliveries to citizens.
In most cases I checked it was obvious that public sector didn’t require accessibility from their vendors or that they were unable to verify deliveries really were accessible. On the practical side of the story that may not come to surprise with understaffed and under-budgeted offices that must control WAD. Some countries are doing way better than others and it would be interesting to make an objective comparison and cost/benefit analysis, but it’s obvious that accessibility controllers need budget, knowledge and people.
Otherwise they are not even able to do their regular work – pattern based audits. They can’t even react to complains from public in an effective way. So this really drills down to politics and public awareness. Public sector stakeholders and politicians, together with organizations of people with disabilities should discuss needs and realistic effects together, media should support people with disabilities and their right to complain when they are discriminated and vendors should really invest into learning and implementing accessibility.
I don’t have the data to back my findings, but I think it is evident when we check Funka’s barometer (in Swedish, opens in new window), where they ran an automatic test on 1785 public sector websites and found out that almost 93% of them still have WCAG problems in their code. Such automatic tests could be easily done in all countries, but I know for sure that countries don’t have lists of all public sector websites that would make such a test way easier.
I’ve tried to make my own automatic testing tool, aXeSiA where I combined multiple test methodologies, and am sure that similar tools would be very simple to implement and use to gather data continuously. I know that Norwegian Authority for Universal Design of ICT (opens in new window) is also making some automatic testing and their centralized solution for accessibility statements and feedback (in Norwegian, opens in new window) will make it quite easy to also run their own automatic audits for all public sector subjects.
It will take time, but WAD is something that will make public sector digital channels at least more accessible. Hope that stakeholders, citizens and politicians will understand and support it’s true meaning and also make it realistic, with knowledge, budgets and people.
