2025 – the year for worldwide e-commerce accessibility?

(Loaded 109 times)

2025 is the year of European Accessibility Act. But we can establish that it will help with global accessibility, not only European.

New year brings new opportunities, but 2025 will be a very special year for accessibility because of the European Accessibility Act (EAA). 29th of June 2025 is namely a key date by which all European Union states must begin applying the measures in the act.

The bad parts

Before I get to the new opportunities I need to consider the negative parts of the situation.

European Accessibility Act was published already in 2019, in 2025 it will finally be applied. It is still something new for a lot of organizations, unfortunately and surprisingly. It seems that some governments are still just preparing for the practical implementations and I suspect that is a huge disfavor to the cause – as we lost a lot of precious time that could be used to build awareness, train people, make products and services more accessible. It seems that some countries (and with them organizations) lost 6 years. It seems that new legislation will surprise many organizations because of the missing awareness. That could be built long before 2025.

I guess this is a direct reflection of the lack of accessibility awareness in the whole society. That accessibility is (still, mostly) not a part of our education and that society mostly still perceives disabilities with medical lenses.

The good parts

When we consider the positive context of the act – we can quickly detect that EAA will spill over the borders of European Union and help the state of global accessibility, at least partially.

I see that EAA is considered a lot with the large (e-commerce) providers (that offer e-commerce and similar services as a service). That don’t want to have problems in European markets. Some of them also harvest the benefits of early awareness, probably there because of Americans with Disabilities Act and other regulations in the world context. Such large platforms have the power of integrating accessibility on a scale. They often have the power to fix same issue on literally millions of websites with a single release. And some are already doing this. With EAA they will just do it more.

Financial sector is used to regulation and I detect they are quite serious about accessibility. Vendors for banks, insurances and so on are normally a part of it. Procurement with focus on accessibility helps everybody.

Agencies are also a giant part of the puzzle. Being asked about the level of accessibility of their deliveries more and more makes them aware of accessibility. And they feel the need for training, the need to learn and implement accessibility. With that it also comes to an interesting effect – when they make their deliveries more accessible for sectors that are in the scope of regulations (public sector due to Web Accessibility Directive and not parts of private sector (e-commerce and banking), to simplify) – their accessibility competency spills over to other deliveries that are perhaps not in the scope of regulations (yet). Design systems, ways of working and other accessibility best practices can’t just be unlearned when we are working. Sure, I have seen scenarios where stakeholders implicitly say “we don’t need WCAG conformance”, but it’s still difficult to totally neglect it when you are used of having it for other projects. Designers, developers and content creators that reached some accessibility maturity quickly do guerilla accessibility (make thins accessible even when they were asked not to use time on that).

When local governments finally land on the practical details – main stream media can finally help with spreading the accessibility awareness. If they will be motivated enough. In my experience – I see direct correlation of accessibility maturity and occurrence of accessibility and disability awareness in main stream media. When main stream media helps with accessibility awareness – people can’t just continue to ignore accessibility as much as they can now – and with that, I hope, it will get more attention from all corners of the society which helps a lot with the whole process.

To conclude – I am afraid that time lost will show and that e-commerce will be a bit more accessible, but not as much as it could be if legislative stakeholders would plan better. Where are public campaigns? Where are awareness and knowledge building events and resources? Legislative stakeholders are surely aware of this and unfortunately this also means they will not be able to enforce the legislation fully as they did not do enough themselves. But nevertheless, EAA will help a lot, I am certain. Awareness alone is far from enough, but it is a giant step into the right direction. And expanding the effects of WAD will be even larger as WAD was targeting only the public sector while EAA will really need the awareness (and implementation) on a much wider, global level.

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.

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