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EU Runs World’s Largest Accessibility Test
A Deque article that is well worth a read. The EU Web Accessibility Directive (issued in October 2016) stipulated that all government agencies in the EU were required to ensure their websites and apps are accessible by June 2021.
Every country has to monitor the accessibility of its digital assets annually and report its findings to the EU every three years. December 23rd, 2021 was the end of the first reporting period. This article looks at those reports and picks out some highlights; I’ve pasted some key paragraphs below:
“Having a fully accessible website is sort of like having a dust-free house. If you work hard at it, it is something you might achieve, but keeping it that way is almost impossible. The real question is how common and how substantial the accessibility problems are. This is difficult to say, as there is no standard way to measure this. Unfortunately, this means that in the next report, it will be difficult to judge if web accessibility in those countries improved over time.”
“Kudos to the countries that did attempt to quantify their findings. We can’t make direct comparisons between countries because they don’t use the same metrics, [but] three years from now we will be able to see to what extent accessibility has improved. One example is www.toegankelijkheidsverklaring.nl, a register of Dutch Government websites, ranked A to E.”
“The European standard EN 301 549 (v2.1.2) includes a good number of accessibility requirements that are not part of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). For example, section 11.7 requires apps to support user preferences configurable through the operating system. It is therefore notable that more than half of the countries did not consider the additional EN requirements in their monitoring efforts.”
“All 27 EU members conducted research. The United Kingdom produced a report as well, though there was no formal obligation to the EU. The UK ceased to be a member state of the European Union on the 31st of January 2020. What we loved was how the UK communicated their results and retested the sites 3 months later to see how much they had progressed. This showed that sharing these results greatly improved these sites.”
“[This] is a great step forward for establishing digital accessibility as a standard across Europe. As always, there is room for improvement. The need for standard metrics in accessibility, for example, is a common limitation of the current standards, which the upcoming WCAG 3.0 may address. The next reporting period for the EU ends in December 2024, although we hope monitoring agencies will consider publishing preliminary results annually.”
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