Not a very well known fact, but all products and services that are in the scope of EAA and include support services will also need to have them accessible.
Category: Laws and regulations
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2025 is the year of European Accessibility Act. But we can establish that it will help with global accessibility, not only European.
European public sector websites and mobile apps are required to have feedback mechanism. I believe that such feedback helps any kind of organization, even single person businesses.
Don’t get too concerned about the differences between WCAG on levels A and AA and instead use the energy to go beyond and implement AAA.
EAA goes beyond technical accessibility. It’s reference to Design for All is a well planned strategical motivator for culture change!
I am a bit biased towards technical parts of accessibility, but when I studied EAA even more, I finally understand why it does not try to be technical.
If people treat EAA as yet another compliance thing I think they are missing the greater picture, and probably also greater business.
Short reflection on positive and negative situations related to accessibility standards. Unification, or to say standardization of accessibility standards, should be our common goal.
Sometimes it can be hard to embrace accessibility when we only consider the business perspective. And some people need harsh motivation, when good for people and good for business arguments are not enough.
Making large scale analysis of accessibility based on centralized accessibility statements is simple. But we do need to consider that not everybody filling out accessibility statements have the needed experience and knowledge. And sometimes the intention to be transparent is also absent.
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!
Brief reflection on 3 years of WAD in EU and short version of attending WAD anniversary event which was really worth attending.
Sustainability and accessibility are absolutely interconnected. Recent sustainability guidelines, although still in draft version, are quite often referring to accessibility, so I wanted to expose parts where accessibility is beneficial to sustainability.
Some brief thoughts on how to make a small business more accessible, at least digitally. Don’t take it as a project, it is a program, a journey.
WCAG 2.2 seems to be around the corner, document is currently a Proposed recommendation. But what does that actually mean?
European Accessibility Act is around the corner. 100 weeks is not a lot in terms of conformance and compliance. Especially considering banking, e-commerce and transport services that will be a part of EAA. What to do? Start now!
I don’t like the fact that EN 301 549 is provided in PDF format. It’s way simpler to process HTML. And when I did some parsing I figured out I could also check how exactly does EN 301 549 goes beyond WCAG for web and mobile applications. Quite a lot is the short answer.
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.
I stumbled upon a lot of websites that had untrue accessibility statements. It’s quite easy to know when they are not being honest actually. Some goes even so far to claim they are compliant and conform to WCAG 2.1 on AAA level while their autoplaying hero video with no controls is screaming “lies” to me.
I received a brief question about Web Accessibility in Norway and if it is different from the EU and decided to write a short post as an answer.
In 2023 we got some updates to Norwegian accessibility legislation and I try to summarize the newest situation in this short post.
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.
Need for quicker digital product deliveries connected with remote work due to pandemics and the soon-coming European Accessibility Act will most certainly make a gap in the need for accessibility specialists. Current situation of certified accessibility professionals by the IAAP may indicate which countries are more prepared and which less. The fact remains that we need more accessibility specialists and we need them now!