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Five 2022 accessibility trends
A UX Collective article outlining predicted trends for 2022:
- The web will become more accessible – particularly the websites of larger companies.
- The SOAR report found that 62% of the Alexa 100 websites were accessible to screen readers, up from 40% in 2020.
- The WebAIM Million project found a very slight improvement in the accessibility of homepages across the web (from 2020 to 2021), but it will take until “the 2070s or 2080s” at this rate for the entire web to be accessible.
- Digital accessibility lawsuits will continue to increase
- More than 4000 accessibility lawsuits (based on the Americans with Disabilities Act) were filed in the USA in 2021.
- The Hooters case found that companies can be sued even if they already have remediation efforts underway and if they’ve already entered into a settlement agreement with another party.
- We’ll see less usage of accessibility overlays
- Over 200 overlay customers were sued in 2021 for lack of accessibility on their website.
- There could well be counterclaims against overlay companies from these customers.
- One overlay company, AudioEye, had a stock value of $42 in February 2021, but recently fell to less than $7.
- WCAG 2.2 will be the new standard most companies use to determine accessibility
- The standard is expected to be finalised by the end of March 2022. WCAG 2.1 took just 4 months from being finalised to being referenced in its first settlement agreement; WCAG 2.2 is likely to follow a similar trend.
- The article suggests that the most difficult of the new WCAG 2.2 criteria to implement will be SC 3.3.7: Accessible Authentication.
- Large companies will want to get a head start on WCAG 3.0
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