Web Accessibility Directive (WAD) is now four years old and we have a bit more to reflect upon, especially what it has done to accessibility beyond public sector (that is the main scope).
The biggest positive impact of WAD beyond public sector, as I see it, is awareness of people and organizations that are key to digitalization of public sector. Agencies and people involved in making webpages, mobile applications, documents, social media and more needed to adapt to include (more) accessibility. We are still not done (far from it), but it is at least sure that we are more aware of the impacts. This awareness is different from organization to organization and from person to person, to no surprise.
Some organizations and people still treat accessibility as a compliance “thing”, some people understand more about it’s importance (and want to be better at it) and some people embraced the opportunity to innovate beyond accessibility baseline required by WAD and similar legislation.
Unfortunately I still see that too many organizations and people that treat accessibility as a compliance requirement, which is for me a negative impact of legislative requirements in general. I suspect that one of the main reasons for it is that they weren’t provided with the whole explanation – the “why accessibility?” wasn’t really clarified to them. I suspect they lack (deeper) awareness and understanding, and with that they obviously didn’t get the main message – the reasons behind why we need accessibility to prevent discrimination, to make our products and services better and reach (and keep) more people. They are obviously unaware of the cultural changes needed to implement accessibility.
Agencies working with public sector use their experiences to make private sector more accessible
I really want to focus on the positive impacts. And there are a lot of positive impacts, even with organizations and people that only treat WAD as additional checkbox on the compliance checklist. Besides spreading awareness and making people deliver more accessible parts in their work, WAD makes agencies implement accessibility also for private sector.
Agencies working with both private and public sector re-use their knowledge and sometimes even components in their private sector projects. Some agencies go even further and spread awareness of the benefits of accessibility to their private sector clients (even those that are not in the scope of coming European Accessibility Act (EAA)).
Once you got trained to produce accessible services and products it is hard to let it go. Once you understand the added value, time saved, simpler and easier to use interfaces it is easy to advocate for accessibility even for clients that do not know about it.
When using systems – like design systems and content systems, in the terms of both methodologies and parts, it’s easy to replicate best accessibility practices and it’s also good for the whole supply chain.
Private sector selling to public sector
Procurement is essential to all kinds of clients, including public sector. With WAD it is even more obvious that public sector that relies on private sector products and services needs to make sure those are accessible. This adds motivation to private sector if they want to be considered, already in the procurement phases.
It was important before, but with WAD it is essential – to know the state of accessibility for all services and products that needs to be acquired for public sector needs. This adds a clear responsibility to private sector actors that need to first map accessibility of their products and services, make accessibility audits and accessibility conformance reports, provide accessibility statements and, most importantly, work on improvements to make their products and services (more) accessible.
With EAA this will be even more vital, but when we consider all private sector organizations that are already selling to public sector, we understand that the impact of the WAD is way beyond public sector alone.
And with time, the positive effects of WAD will only spread. Even if WAD is European it’s already spreading beyond Europe – all companies that want to sell their services and products to public sector in Europe need to improve or take huge risks (or just being left out of the procurement immediately).
