eGovernment Benchmark of 35 countries in Europe (EU and beyond) finally gathered some insights about accessibility of eGovernment websites. After years of accessibility legislation accessibility is still a pilot indicator which unfortunately indicates how late we are in the awareness process.
Category: Accessibility testing
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A little knowledge is a dangerous thing proverb goes also for accessibility. When we are motivated to implement newly acquired knowledge after a training we can quickly start overusing techniques and can even make our product less accessible.
WCAG 2.2 is here, when do we get it into legislation, like Web Accessibility Directive and European Accessibility Act? Well EN 301 549 seems to be updating in 2025, according to work item schedule it may come in early 2026. Unless ETSI adds WCAG 2.2 sooner it seems that we will have to wait quite a long time.
Municipality avoided paying fines after vendor of e-learning app fixed issues with 4 success criteria out of 6 tested (all A level). I found some interesting facts that seem to reveal procurement and especially awareness problems and I also offer some potential solutions.
9 new success criteria and one less in WCAG 2.2. Removing 4.1.1 from WCAG 2.2 impacting WCAG 2.0 and WCAG 2.1 as well (can’t fail 4.1.1 anymore). Even if three new WCAG 2.2 success criteria are on level AAA I don’t see reasons to not implementing them as they bring much value!
Concentrating on WCAG alone can feel like accessibility is always binary. When thinking about all the success criteria of the WCAG we can quickly conclude that there is not a single medium sized website in the world that conforms totally. A reflection on perfectionism, conformance and reality.
Sometimes best practices are passed as WCAG requirements and that can make accessibility more difficult for some people to implement. We need to understand what WCAG actually requires and what it does not before we try to impact other people.
WCAG 2.2 seems to be around the corner, document is currently a Proposed recommendation. But what does that actually mean?
Keyboard only users (or users of keyboard based assistive technologies) depend on seeing focus indications at all times and if they can’t see them, they are left to guessing where they are. With soon-to-come WCAG 2.2 focus must be at least partially visible at all times, simply put.
I am honored to be a part of a group of experts that will provide some feedback to European Union on accessibility and Web Accessibility Directive. This post is a summary of my ideas that will be in the article with some additional thoughts and context.
Are accessibility overlays common on Norwegian municipality websites? Short answer is no, luckily. But when they are they really messed up the site. Not only accessibility-wise but also on mobile devices / smaller screens / when zooming in.
I am not the only one concerned about accessibility and it seems that I also had similar timing, methodology and results. I didn’t go all in with the crawling of absolutely everything and I didn’t test the documents as they did. So that’s why I made a short summary to enrich my own analysis.
This is the fourth part in a series and in this post I expand the automatic analysis report to cover approximately 50 webpages under each of 356 Norwegian municipalities – 17837 URLs to be precise.
The general outcome is quite interesting and I was surprised to see some very positive trends as well.
Accessibility statements can claim all sorts of things but we should test as much as we can to establish the reality. The simplest and quickest way to do that is to use automatic tests. In this post I reflect on the results of automatic tests of homepages for all Norwegian municipalities. You will be surprised as I was.
Accessibility statements required by Web Accessibility Directive are quite efficient indicators of websites accessibility, when sites are audited by professionals with some experiences. We don’t have better data than this at the moment, so let’s process this a bit and then dive into numbers and findings.
What is the state of accessibility of municipal websites in Norway? Now we can get some data based on their official accessibility statements. While doing so we can also draw some conclusions, but this post is only the first part of a series of posts on the subject and talks mainly about motivation, methodology and preparation.
I love WebAIMs Million, but I need to point some things out. Some people may come to wrong conclusions after reading parts of the report and I hope I can improve that. I also think I know the reason and the solution about the still very poor state of accessibility.
Once again a discussion I had on problems with headings after an accessibility audit. Can we get it right and can we have a sustainable solution? I believe so!
When developers discover ARIA and try to misuse or overuse it we get more problems than we may have before. It’s not just that, even if they do everything correctly we risk to have an inaccessible product due to missing support of theoretically great ARIA.
Please forget about automatic document outline and plan accordingly. Make it work for people and not for search engines. It’s once again a team effort – design, develop and content.
Writing a blog post on the 25th of December allows me to write about wishes. And one of them is to have better tools for accessibility auditing.
This post tries to describe what I would like to get from the tool. Realistically, noting too advanced.
I’ve learned that WCAG can’t be changed a lot and that only additions are allowed. Now I’ve read that WCAG 2.2 will have the 4.1.1 success criterion (parsing) removed. My first reaction was – why and how will we work with problems in HTML then? On the other hand we should probably be happy we can focus on other problems that are more related directly to accessibility.
Accessibility tree in browser and screen-reader’s speech logs are extremely valuable tools when we want to check how HTML, CSS and ARIA translate to assistive technologies like screen-readers, no doubt about that. But please make sure to go through to the end – do listen to your screen-readers and in different combinations with browsers. As sometimes that’s the only way to find out about real problems.
What would I have in an automatic accessibility testing tool if I could have anything that is possible with today’s technology?
Well, I would start at the beginning – clear scope and known priorities is a start and sometimes we can’t really cover all that when we have to choose where we need to focus. Next, I would like to teach the tool, so that it will be more and more independent. And because I like to stand for my decisions – I would like to use the blockchain to prove my efforts and fixes. Words can be empty, deeds talk.
In this blog post I go into details behind automatic accessibility testing and how I don’t really trust any accessibility scores such tools provide.
It all drills down to inability of automatic tools to pass WCAG success criteria and limited ability of them to fail some. Manual testing is the only real way to really know about state of accessibility.
Attended web performance conference (performance.now()) and found some thoughts about similarities with accessibility. Also made a simple proof of concept for a time to interactive metrics for screen-readers and other assistive technologies.
Before you order your accessibility audit you should read this article of mine. I try to be objective and constructive and present the good and the bad, the strengths and the weaknesses of accessibility audits.
The journey from content creator to end user is quite long. At least in terms of different software that needs to deliver. And as we all know – software has bugs. And sometimes even so called features that can actually be called bugs as well. So please test and if we find a problem – report it, so that we improve the accessibility one step at a time.
Some reflections after two years. Progress is slow, but steady. Personally I would invest into automatic testing solutions to monitor some basics, but that’s probably not possible before stakeholders, politicians and organizations really understand the impacts.