European Accessibility Act (shortly EAA, officially Directive (EU) 2019/882, opens in new window) is coming, the act is a fact. And it’s a fact that you probably need to act. Even if you are not in the scope, even if you are not in the EU, chances are you are impacted. And even if you know you are not impacted – it’s an opportunity to recognize the act as an driver for a couple of business critical facts:
- Accessibility widens your reach – consider human experience in different phases of life – don’t just concentrate on the permanent, visible disabilities – think about your daily experiences with situations and circumstances when your environment can disable you as well. Perhaps for a second, but still – it’s a fact that everybody benefits from accessibility, and it’s essential for people with disabilities.
- Accessibility improves your brand image – well, not discriminating should be the default, but it’s not. So when we live accessibility and try to really be inclusive it helps our brand image as well. And you know that your brand image is essential to your business.
- Accessibility lowers legal risks – even if you are not in the scope of EAA or other legal accessibility requirements you can still have legal consequences when you are not accessible. It’s a fact that accessibility regulation spreads to more and more countries and it’s essential to be accessible if you want to operate international as well.
I hope you support my claims and perhaps you wonder how to act on them. Where to start? How to make it sustainable? Well, we have multiple possibilities and it all depends on your type of organization and internal and external processes. But, speaking in general, we can get a lot of clues from organizations that have decades of experience. And that cooperated and even made standards to help others. Standards like EN 17161 – Design for All (beside others). I like EN 17161 because it’s indirectly mentioned in the EAA, so let me introduce to some steps that can help you.
EN 17161 – Design for All standard to the rescue
I am not an expert on standardization, but I feel I need to briefly (re)introduce the standard. EN 17161 Design for All is an European standard, officially called EN 17161:2019 Design for All – Accessibility following a Design for All approach in products, goods and services – Extending the range of users.
European Committee for Standardization (CEN) wrote the standard in the so called Mandate M/473, for the need of European Accessibility Act (EAA). EAA is directly referencing the Design for All approach in article 50:
Article 50 of the European Accessibility Act (opens in new window) with a reference to “design for all” approach.
Accessibility should be achieved by the systematic removal and prevention of barriers, preferably through a universal design or ‘design for all’ approach, which contributes to ensuring access for persons with disabilities on an equal basis with others. According to the UN CRPD, that approach ‘means the design of products, environments, programmes and services to be usable by all people, to the greatest extent possible, without the need for adaptation or specialized design’. In line with the UN CRPD, ’‘universal design’ shall not exclude assistive devices for particular groups of persons with disabilities where this is needed’. Furthermore, accessibility should not exclude the provision of reasonable accommodation when required by Union law or national law. Accessibility and universal design should be interpreted in line with General Comment No 2(2014) – Article 9: Accessibility as written by the Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.
I really recommend buying the standard and adjusting it to your agencies processes and policies. Unfortunately, the standard is not free (except in some countries and in some conditions), but that’s another story. I hope I can still make some points here to help you understand what can be done, even if you don’t buy the standard (I need to censor myself though due to copyright, so this is just my opinion and not a direct recital from the standard).
- Start with a maturity assessment – before you improve the efforts you need to know where you stand. To make a plan you need to know where you are and where you need to be and how to get there. As it is common with similar standards – you need to self-assess accessibility on an organizational level – leadership, policies, processes and all the organizational stuff like how you run your projects and products.
- Make accessibility a business strategy – it’s not a project – it needs to be integrated in basically all parts of the organization. It’s not just a thing for designers and developers. Even if the name “Design for All” implies design and can make some people think – “OK, our designer will fix this”, don’t let the title mislead you. It’s not only about design as in the work that designers do. It’s more a design on an organizational level!
- When you know where you are and you have the strategy you can continue with workflows – the tactical parts. Starting with accessibility at early stages when starting a project. Remediating legacy as a planned process, not just as a random fire extinguishing project. Defined workflows and activities with key performance indicators being measured, lessons learned put into system to spread the knowledge and spreading the experiences systematically is a way to proceed.
- For this to work – roles need to understand their responsibilities. They need to know not only what, but also how things need to work in practice. How to implement accessibility in their workflows. People need to be trained. They need to have resources to implement accessibility. Even the best programs and policies fail when people don’t know how to do it. Or at least to let them get external accessibility help when they need it.
- Improve continuously, evaluate, repeat. We can’t have it all and perfect. It just don’t work like this in reality. It’s not possible before experience and support from accessibility specialist and users with disabilities. It takes time and patience, and we need to understand that there is no perfect accessibility. Sure, we can conform to different standards, but that’s just the baseline. It just means that we cover basic known accessibility, but it doesn’t mean that our product is also usable.
- We see accessibility as a strength, not a burden. It’s only after we can implement it, I would say. When it’s not treated as a compliance and regulation burden, but as a strength, a marked differentiator (because lot’s of agencies still don’t implement it), an internal and external motivator and net promoter score booster.
Once again – we have a standard that can be thought of as another burden, or sometimes as an idealistic document. But if we adjust it’s recommendations to suit our agency we can use it as a guideline to implement accessibility culture with a system. It’s just another standard, but it can really help us with the difficult thing – a change of culture – that is actually the only sustainable thing to implement accessibility. And authors of European Accessibility Act intentionally added it as a reference, to finally get organizations to recognize the possibilities.
You can implement accessibility into your organization in thousand of different ways, you do not need a standard for that. But it surely helps to have a plan, to have a list of things that help you remember what to consider. To have a map to an unknown territory.
You can do it by yourself or you can reach out and be more efficient with advice from specialists that have helped others and are some steps further on the accessibility maturity journey.
