The tiniest progress
Hello from your accessibility pal Eric Eggert.
How has 2025 been to you so far? It treated me relatively well, but with all the upheaval around the world, I did not get to write this newsletter as often as I wanted. Because doing it once every 6 months is not the cadence I envisioned.
Anyway. After new old politicians, elections, more new politicians in new places, almost no rain in the first three months of the year, ongoing and new wars, I don’t really feel that I have much of substance to say.
My year has been stressful, as predicted in the last newsletter, but in different ways than I would have thought. And it’s a little worrying.
Instead of working hard and furiously to fix accessibility bugs, many conversations were about laws and how the EAA would affect companies, and how some provisions of the EN 301 549 would need to be interpreted.
It showed me two things: First, that people will try to skirt accessibility, even if it is (becoming) a law. I had many very honest conversations with clients, telling them that their efforts will not be enough. And they have not been. I would rather not blame them, as the reason is often just a culture of sidelining disabled people. (I’ve written about the need to be anti-ableist in 2024 (Opens in a new window).)
The second thing is how unprepared some countries are for this law. Take my country, Germany. While Sweden has a clear “market surveillance agency” (the people who actually test and fine for accessibility), which has even produced a web application where companies can submit their accessibility violations, Germany doesn’t.
Commerce and regulation of it is a state responsibility, so every state would need to have an agency. That is, of course, expensive and unnecessary. So at the beginning of the year, the German states agreed to combine their agencies into one. This agency is yet to be formed, despite the EAA being in effect.
Some states just did not manage in time to make the parliamentary decisions necessary to defer to this agency. There, it won’t happen until after the summer break. I don’t know what the legal implications are at this point. I am not a lawyer, but it objectively shows how this country’s ableist history can still manifest.
We will eventually get our act together, but it soured the EAA deadline date for me. Many celebrated it, and it’s their good right. But for me, it underlined even more what a slow process it will be to get all these agencies up to speed and then get to an understanding on how they interpret the flexible and unclear requirements of the EN.
This work has just begun, and it will be a wild ride. It will often feel as if we are only making the tiniest progress and yet, time and time again, we have to see that accessibility happens by a thousand curb cuts (Opens in a new window).
👋 Eric
Six blog posts
I have published six blog posts since the last newsletter:
Values (Opens in a new window) — When a large accessibility company announced to pivot to “AI”, I wrote about my values, and how those values differ from those of companies. It was an article like I would usually write it in this newsletter. So if you like my short essay above, read this article, too. The company has meanwhile pivoted another few times. (Insert the famous “Pivot!!” animated GIF from friends here, if you like.)
WAI A Day (Opens in a new window) & WAI A Day: A week (Opens in a new window) — To highlight some Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) resources, I created the WAI A Day bot that posts a random WAI resource once a day to Mastodon (Opens in a new window). It’s also reluctantly available on Bluesky (Opens in a new window).
Tag, you’re it (Opens in a new window) — A short blog post about blogging.
So, you screwed up your EAA compliance. What now? (Opens in a new window)— The title says it all: Many companies will have not met the compliance targets, and it is now important to keep a level head and guide them through the process.
Deutschland: Berichte belegen blamable Bilanz bei digitaler Barrierefreiheit (Opens in a new window) — When Casey Kreer collected accessibility audits for public companies, I knew I had to write one of my rare articles in German. (Casey is on Steady (Opens in a new window), doing essential activistic/journalistic accessibility work here in Germany. Support her, if you can. (Opens in a new window))
Accessibility Statements
I started a list of accessibility statements (Opens in a new window), for us to compare and contrast. You are welcome to contribute by opening an issue (Opens in a new window) or sending in Pull Requests (Opens in a new window). Currently, it’s Germany/Swedish dominated, but I would love to see how companies in other countries approach the statements.
Note that I use Codeberg (Opens in a new window) instead of GitHub to not rely on a US company for this EU-centric project, and also I have no need of a “Copilot”.
W3C Content Accessibility Guidelines 3 (WCAG 3)
WCAG 3 hasn’t had an update since December, so no new concrete updates. As a re-charter is due (this is basically where the Working Group [WG] gives itself a roadmap for publishing a new standard) a few different options for WCAG 3 publication are discussed (Opens in a new window). Unfortunately, all discussions seem to lead into the first half of next decade for a first published variant, almost a decade after the last version of Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.
I am not convinced that’s a suitable approach, and I commented in the discussion thread above. We should be making progress faster, incrementally, in my opinion. Unfortunately, it looks like the WG seems to be steadfast in their attempt to make one big change.
Parting Words
Thanks again to everyone who has subscribed to this newsletter and a special thanks to all ten members, you know who you are, and you rock! Without you, my engagement in standards and elsewhere would not be possible.
👋 Eric
Socials
My primary social media/Fediverse/Mastodon handle is @yatil@yatil.social (Opens in a new window), and you can also find me on LinkedIn (Opens in a new window).
