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Why should all organizations establish feedback mechanisms for accessibility?

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.

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Web Accessibility Directive with positive accessibility effects beyond public sector

Time flies and after four years of directive we can reflect a bit more on the positive effects beyond public sector.

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Accessibility errors based on accessibility statements of Norwegian public sector websites

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.

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Comparison of accessibility of e-government websites in Europe

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.

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All countries should have central registries for accessibility statements of their public sector

Without data we just have opinions. Having a lot of data in different formats can take time to process and sometimes also mean we can’t really compare state of accessibility if countries use different methodologies. If all countries had same data set or even better, central registry it would make data more accessible. And we could save time and money.

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Norwegian municipality almost got fined for using inaccessible e-learning mobile app

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.

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14% of customers will probably go away if site is inaccessible for them

Found an interesting study that should encourage business owners to do something about poor accessibility of their websites and mobile apps. Hopefully somebody will think about how much people their business is potentially missing.

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WCAG is part of EN 301 549 but EN 301 549 goes way beyond WCAG

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.

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Some thoughts on how I think Web Accessibility Directive can be improved

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.

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Accessibility of municipal websites in Norway after Web Accessibility Directive – usage of accessibility overlays

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.

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Accessibility of municipal websites in Norway after Web Accessibility Directive – parallel analysis by another actor – summary

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.

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Accessibility of municipal websites in Norway after Web Accessibility Directive – more on automatic accessibility tests

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.

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Accessibility of municipal websites in Norway after Web Accessibility Directive – automatic accessibility tests

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.

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Accessibility of municipal websites in Norway after Web Accessibility Directive – statements analysis

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.

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Accessibility of municipal websites in Norway after Web Accessibility Directive – introduction

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.

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How are accessibility statements supposed to be useful?

Being busy with accessibility audits because everybody want’s to make their accessibility statements made me think about usefulness of them. When is an usability statement useful? Hint – it’s not about how good your Lighthouse scores are. It’s about how you can help real people with real problems.

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Accessibility scoring don’t tell much about actual state of accessibility

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.