Reflection on third year of Web Accessibility Directive in the EU

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Brief reflection on 3 years of WAD in EU and short version of attending WAD anniversary event which was really worth attending.

Three years ago European Union harmonized accessibility requirements across member states and going even beyond Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) with additional accessibility requirements.

It seems that we got some progress, at least on the awareness level, but I think that people with disabilities and accessibility professionals unfortunately agree that progress is too slow. It’s also difficult to measure progress on high level of the whole EU as countries had the opportunity to make their own reporting and even own methodologies. That makes it hard for a whole-EU overview facts, but some countries decided to publish accessibility statuses of their public sector websites, so we can actually get some real insights based on real numbers.

My intention with this post isn’t to go through details, but it is evident that progress is slow and we still have a long journey before us. I attended the online event for celebration of the third anniversary of WAD (opens in new window), organized by International Association of Accessibility Professionals (IAAP) and European Disability Forum (EDF) on the 21th of September and must say that it was one of the most professional and knowledgeable online events I have experienced throughout the years. It’s hard to summarize everything in short form and not leave anything important out but let me just say that I got a confirmation about many ideas I got on my own. If you can, I invite you to check the captioned videos they will provide, it’s practically worth watching all of them if you want to learn more about the situation, pain points, discussions and suggestions.

I like to use lists and I will do my best to really summarize the whole event in the shortest possible form:

  • Different approaches, methodologies and legal consequences make things more complicated than they should be and I am not the only one that feels that.
  • WAD and WCAG are often treated as a maximum effort, not the baseline. There are practically no sites out there that can honestly claim full conformance.
  • Accessibility statements, where present, seem to target monitoring agencies and not end users. At the same time they are often not updated, just copied from other sites or even totally untrue.
  • Feedback isn’t encouraged and it also seems that feedback is rarely used.
  • Awareness is maybe there but in most cases only to satisfy compliance and manage risk.

So – still a lot of problems – but there is some progress in some parts and varies quite a lot between countries.

I work mostly in Norway and Norway got WAD in 2022 and in Norway WAD only requires WCAG, but in my experience the state is generally quite similar to average EU country. I did some analysis of accessibility of Norwegian municipalities and it seems that WAD effects are similar as they are in EU. European Accessibility Act will for sure improve the awareness part and hopefully also improve the public sector accessibility as time brings more experience, focus, audit results, potential media coverage and so on, but only time will tell what the progress will actually be.

It is a fact that we need even more awareness, knowledge, expert and end user feedback and we all have a role to make things better.

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: