2025 is the year of European Accessibility Act. But we can establish that it will help with global accessibility, not only European.
Tag: WAD
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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.
Time flies and after four years of directive we can reflect a bit more on the positive effects beyond public sector.
Dear leader, this is a letter to you. If you lead people, you need to lead accessibility.Do not just delegate it. You will thank me later.
AI is a fact. Some say it will improve accessibility, and I hope it will, but please consider the facts and new regulation.
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.
Benchmarking of accessibility of different e-government digital services and how well do different countries do is a start, but beware!
Any help to make native mobile application accessibility clearer is welcome. We really need to know more to make apps more accessible.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Brief reflection on 3 years of WAD in EU and short version of attending WAD anniversary event which was really worth attending.
WCAG 2.2 seems to be around the corner, document is currently a Proposed recommendation. But what does that actually mean?
Digital transformation – as we move from paper to spreadsheets and then to smart applications for all parts of our business needs, we have the obligation to make our future digital business accessible from the start.
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.
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.
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 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.
Private sector should embrace accessibility statements and feedback mechanisms. Starting with measuring accessibility in processes and products and then documenting it in public while offering feedback is the best way to go.
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.
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.