Only about 100 weeks until European Accessibility Act (EAA)

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European Accessibility Act is around the corner. 100 weeks is not a lot in terms of conformance and compliance. Especially considering banking, e-commerce and transport services that will be a part of EAA. What to do? Start now!

I am looking forward to European Accessibility Act (EAA). If not anything else I really hope media will set more focus on accessibility and add to more awareness. Because even if we have Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 from 5th June of 2018 and even if we have Web Accessibility Directive (WAD) from 23rd of September 2020 I still miss more awareness in the media, schools and especially among stakeholders.

Current situation – all websites are more or less inaccessible and things move very slowly

According to WebAIM Million accessibility analysis we are still struggling with about 96% of top million sites obviously having accessibility issues. When we consider that automatic accessibility tests only catch about 30% of accessibility issues we can be almost certain that all top sites have accessibility issues.

I like the effectiveness of automatic testing that makes it very simple to check thousands of webpages for accessibility issues and that’s why I also automatically tested all Norwegian municipalities and also analyzed accessibility statements of all Norwegian municipalities. I did it to test my automatic tooling and to check how accessible they are. No surprises there – all of them have issues. Absolutely all of them. WCAG can sometimes be very binary so in it’s perspective all Norwegian municipality websites are inaccessible.

According to Norwegian accessibility legislation from 2013 all websites in Norway ought to conform to WCAG 2.0. But most of them are still failing WCAG 2.0. Not to even think about WCAG 2.1.

Why am I talking about Norway in this post? Well, just to demonstrate that legislation alone is not enough. Even after 10 years we still have abundance of websites failing WCAG 2.0. It’s way better in public sector, especially now with WAD, but still not optimal. If we consider EAA that will start in about 100 weeks from writing this post in June of 2023 I can unfortunately be very certain that companies will still fail.

How to prepare for European Accessibility Act? Start yesterday!

As mentioned a lot in multiple posts here and as specialists all over the accessibility community repeat all the time – start early. Not only start but have a plan. I can help here:

  1. Start with simple things, but start now!
  2. You need to change the processes and often the culture as well. Be prepared to do so! Involve people with disabilities, employ them, learn from them.
  3. If you don’t know where you fail, how will you be able to fix errors? Order an accessibility audit to analyze starting point, so that you will be able to improve.
  4. Build internal knowledge but ask for external help at least in the start.
  5. Everybody involved have their role in accessibility – define their responsibilities.
  6. Use automatic tools, but don’t rely only on them – remember, automatic tools only catch about 30% of errors and can’t confirm that products are accessible.
  7. Don’t fall for shortcut solutions like overlays. They don’t help people and often even make it worse.
  8. Measure, fix, repeat. It’s not a project that can be done. It’s a never ending process to improve!

Some parts of accessibility can be overwhelming. But most of them are actually quite logical and easy to fix. Even if you have no experience at all there are simple ways to make things more accessible. Heck, I even believe such basic accessibility knowledge should be a part of our primary schools. If we want to make the world more accessible and if we want to make European Accessibility Act to succeed then we need awareness, action, knowledge, support and budgets.

Author: Bogdan Cerovac

I am IAAP certified Web Accessibility Specialist (from 2020) and was Google certified Mobile Web Specialist.

Work as digital agency co-owner web developer and accessibility lead.

Sole entrepreneur behind IDEA-lab Cerovac (Inclusion, Diversity, Equity and Accessibility lab) after work. Check out my Accessibility Services if you want me to help your with digital accessibility.

Also head of the expert council at Institute for Digital Accessibility A11Y.si (in Slovenian).

Living and working in Norway (🇳🇴), originally from Slovenia (🇸🇮), loves exploring the globe (🌐).

Nurturing the web from 1999, this blog from 2019.

More about me and how to contact me: