European accessibility act (EAA) will require services to provide “information necessary to assess conformity with the accessibility requirements” (clause 81 of European Accessibility Act, opens in new window). I am not a lawyer, but I strongly believe that this can be done with an informative accessibility statement.Informative accessibility statement that is providing following vital sections:
- Compliance status (it will most probably need to refer to EN 301 549 as EAA isn’t prescribing that directly but will cover more than WCAG).
- List of content / functionality that is not accessible and what are the alternatives.
- Disproportionate burden (but don’t be too easy using it – lack of priority, time or knowledge is not a valid reason).
- Feedback mechanism for reporting inaccessibility or to request accessible alternatives.
This is not defined explicitly in the EAA, but if we check the model accessibility statement defined in the Web Accessibility Directive (WAD, opens in new window) that is used in the EU public sector we should be quite covered.
Writing an effective statement that helps end users first and authorities second requires quite a lot of accessibility knowledge and effort. The larger the service or product, the more it takes. Usually we need an accessibility audit to be able to make a proper accessibility statement.
Sometimes organizations don’t even know where to start and just check their competition. And there they may even find an accessibility statement that they “borrow”. I’ve seen that a lot, even in some public sector organizations. And must strongly warn against it.
Both users and authorities quickly see when the accessibility statement is of low or no value. After just minutes of using your service or product they quickly find out the reality of (in)accessibility and if your accessibility statement is not reflecting this reality your brand just lost a lot of trust (or even worse).
So please – don’t just borrow accessibility statements but do the right thing. Invest in knowledge and get help. Get an accessibility audit that will not only help you with accessibility statement, but primarily help you grow on your accessibility journey and help you also with the initiating the EN 17161:2019. Design for All standard.
Audit will help you learn about your product or service more and ideally it will also make you learn how to fix and prevent accessibility issues. It will also help you to build internal knowledge to test and verify accessibility issues and their fixes. And it will make your accessibility statement valuable for all stakeholders, not just checking a checkbox and – after a year updating the date on the accessibility statement.
