Most EU countries seem to do have done too little to build awareness for acts like EAA – at least as far as I could see. Even if I don’t have an detail overview in all countries, I did manage to use some systems and some contacts that assured me this is the case. Countries mostly lost the opportunity to really make sure organizations recognize the positive effects of the EAA. To co-design, to innovate, to really benefit society and people with disabilities. This is not the end, far from it. It is not too late. But awareness takes time. Trainings take time. Audits take time and deadlines are deadlines. Which can’t really be deadlines if people don’t know about them soon enough. It’s not fair. So my guess is that most of organizations are not ready by far. Even most of organizations that will have to monitor accessibility for the country are not ready.
I blame EU countries for poor accessibility awareness. EAA was a huge opportunity, but is now lost – because they did too little for awareness. It’s not too late, it never is, but we all could be further ahead on our accessibility maturity if they started with awareness and knowledge campaigns way sooner.
Just a reflection of mine
The role of so called main stream media is also clear – depending on the accessibility maturity on country level – too little is written about disabilities and accessibility. And – strangely – even when a country will need to respect legislation like European Accessibility Act – news are still mostly ignoring it. Another missed opportunity for accessibility. That can still be corrected, but rarely is. Perhaps the deadline will help a bit? Let’s see…
It’s only normal that most organizations started to “act on the act” too late when we think about it. Awareness needs time, knowledge needs even more time, stakeholders sometimes need more convincing and even organizations in countries with high accessibility maturity are often too slow when it comes to accessibility – which then spreads to organizations in them as well.
I am not saying that awareness spreading is only good – some companies suddenly became experts in accessibility, often copy pasting their accessibility related materials from veteran companies and adjusting it with AI – Artificial Intelligence (well Large Language Models (LLM), in fact). And accessibility overlay vendors offering white-labeling (“use your logo on our product”) got a perfect return of investment opportunities because “everybody” started to talk about accessibility.
Don’t let the EAA deadline rush you onto wrong path
The worst thing to do – to prepare for EAA – right now is to rush things. Relying on AI alone or on a vendor claiming that their AI script will automatically fix all accessibility issues will make things worse.
And using an organization for manual accessibility auditing that does not have any references can be dangerous as well. It takes time to build the knowledge needed to provide valuable accessibility audits, audits that actually explain not only what is wrong, but also what are the effects on people with disabilities and how we can not only fix, but also prevent them.
All too often I see so called manual audits that are mostly done with automatic accessibility testing tools and just a few really manually tested points. This is also extremely dangerous – by not knowing what is wrong we can’t really make things accessible and we often leave lots of users out.
So – please – don’t rush into accessibility – make sure to start with a trusted vendor that will not only provide you what is wrong, but also what needs to be done to prevent issues in the first place!
