Accessibility is getting more and more attention. That is a good thing, better late than never, especially when we consider current state of digital accessibility. European Accessibility Act (EAA) and similar legislation drivers are definitively a good motivator. We have Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) that are over a quarter of century old, and still lots of folks never heard about them (or at least ignoring them when creating new digital products and services).
Not mentioning WCAG (or it’s bigger sibling EN 301 549) in EAA is at first sight a mistake. But adding more thinking to it – it can be an excellent opportunity to go beyond.
Concentrating on the technical parts of accessibility alone, without the needed cultural shift, is often proven to fail. I’ve been in situations where I personally kicked-off accessibility from bottom to top (as a developer advocating throughout organization and to leadership specifically) and often it fails even when we present all the arguments for accessibility. In my situation it failed because the stakeholders changed and the new leadership decided to prioritize cost efficiency and immediate business values instead. There were no discussions about accessibility, it was only seen as a technical quality assurance part with low legal risks. And – low risk (compared to General Data Protection Regulative – GDPR, for example) meant accessibility was suddenly just a bunch of “won’t fix” bugs in project management tool.
Sure, I was not very experienced in the advocacy at that point. But I really provided all the rational and emotional arguments and even got a mandate to start changing the culture, having leaders on-board. And just as we started to finally work more efficiently (I trained different teams) and finally remediating accessibility issues we were put aside and basically shut down.
Design for All (EN 17161) focuses on the organizational integration of best practices
Organization needs to support accessibility efforts and no organization can do it without a clear mandate from it’s leaders. Design for All approach means basically designing products and services to be usable by all people (to the greatest extent possible), without the need for adaptation or specialized design.
Empowering processes for inclusion, recognizing leadership as the “alpha and omega” – at the start and at the end of the implementation. It’s basically a framework for organizations to integrate accessibility into it’s core and ensuring it will be consistently applied.
Besides that it also offers a set of requirements (much like success criteria), but not on a technical level. It sets a standard for organization approaches and processes that really put accessibility in the center. And it even offers a basis for certification.
Design for All is just a suggestion, but quite an obvious one
European Accessibility Act is not saying that EN 17161 must be used. It can be used “voluntary”. Which is, again, a bit confusing at first sight. But I see the intention with this – it is just a way to say that compliance is also possible in other ways, as long as products and services are accessible. And to prove they are accessible we need to cover functional requirements that make things accessible to people with different disabilities.
I consider EN 17161 a good choice when we need to save time and don’t have any better, practical, ways to implement accessibility. It’s providing a stable structure, it provides guidelines for organizations of all sizes and it can, at least partially, be used in any business.
Once again, I don’t understand that Design for All (EN 17161) is not all over the web (like for example ISO 9001 that have some similarities). Sure, it’s from 2019, but considering the EAA deadline (28th of June 2025), I don’t understand that e-commerce and banking are not open about it’s implementation, demonstrating publicly that they are leading with example.
Perhaps it is still too early (even when it is not really), but it may also be a bad sign that will reveal organizations that are not preparing at all (or just in a hurry doing accessibility audits to make accessibility conformance reports where they will all state partial conformance).
If you have read until here – congratulations – I hope you have recognized the possibility that is given to you. Embrace EN 17161 and shift accessibility left, lift it up and make it a core of your organization. Not only the technical parts, but evolve the whole organization and become a leader in your field. It is an excellent investment that will do good for people and good for business!
We need more accessibility focused management consulting, to help the leaders do their part and shift accessibility from neglected to integrated!
