What to know about new accessibility laws
Sprucing up your accessibility page is one of the quick wins you should be considering to comply with the European Accessibility Act. This one from Air France and KLM has good transparency.
At a recent webinar for Bowen Craggs clients, Corbb O’Connor, Director of Accessibility Advocacy at Level Access, answered questions about new accessibility laws in Europe and around the world.
The upshot? Accessibility can no longer be treated as something that you’ll get around to someday; for most large companies, taking accessibility seriously is now the law. Here are six key takeaways from the discussion.
1. Your company is probably now legally required to provide an accessible online experience.
“Accessibility is becoming the status quo.”
The European Accessibility Act (EAA) became law in 2019 and essentially applies to any company that’s doing business in the EU. There are similar laws in place in the UK, Australia, Canada, Japan, Korea, India, Israel, Norway and other countries. In the US, newly recalibrated Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requirements apply to many companies, particularly those with governmental contracts or which receive public funds. The surest way to be on the right side of all these laws is to focus on aligning your channels with the W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.
2. Noncompliance could involve steep penalties.
“The penalties are starting to become clearer.”
The EAA becomes enforceable on 28 June 2025, and the various EU member states will be responsible for monitoring, investigating and doling out penalties for noncompliance. Ireland is talking about potential prison time, and Spain could impose fines up to €600,000 for the most serious infractions. A single complaint could initiate an investigation. If your digital channels are found to be noncompliant, you might get some time to remediate before penalties kick in, but proactively addressing accessibility to prevent such a reckoning is advised. In the US, lawsuits resulting in fines for ADA noncompliance are now so commonplace that they often don’t even get talked about in the press.
3. All indications are that the US government will continue to enforce new accessibility requirements.
“The US laws around accessibility remain unchanged.”
The Trump administration has declared war on DEI, which is sometimes labelled DEIA (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility), but all signs are that America’s accessibility laws will remain on the books. Even if active enforcement lags at the federal level, which seems possible, many state governments are instituting their own accessibility requirements. If you’re in the US and aren’t sure whether your digital channels fall under US or other accessibility laws, now might be a good time to get professional advice.
4. Provide a thorough accessibility statement with a feedback option.
“The first thing you should be thinking about is an accessibility statement.”
The EAA requires a robust “Accessibility” page. This should include as many of the following as you can manage:
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A description of the measures taken and features provided to support accessibility on the site.
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Transparency around how you are working to further improve accessibility. This should be updated regularly.
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An explanation of how you measure the site’s accessibility performance.
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A statement on which standards you are aiming to follow, eg, WCAG 2.1 Level AA.
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Some way for people to give you feedback, such as an email address, phone number or chatbot, or all three (just make sure the chatbot is accessible).
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A mention of which partners you are working with to improve or manage accessibility. This is good for credibility building.
5. Make use of automated tools – AI included – but manual testing remains essential.
“It’s really important to test things with real users with disabilities.”
Don’t trust anyone who tells you they can fix all your accessibility issues with one line of code. There are some exciting things happening around AI tools that can both identify and attempt to remediate accessibility issues such as missing or incorrect labels, with immense speed. But even the most advanced automatic tools can still only identify, at most, around 50% of accessibility issues, and AI-generated labels and transcripts need to be checked for accuracy. Human vetting remains vital, in other words, not least by people with disabilities, who are the ultimate authority on whether or not your digital channels are making them happy.
6. Focus on changes with the greatest impact for visitors.
“Prioritise the most critical actions such as the ones that would prevent a person with a disability from going any further.”
Any thorough accessibility review on a corporate website can easily identify hundreds or even thousands of errors. Fixing them all can take huge amounts of time, so prioritise anything that will block access or otherwise badly frustrate someone with a disability who relies on assistive technologies or a keyboard to interact with your site. “Let’s fix those first before we worry about, man, we’ve got 3,500 images on our website that don’t have alternative text,” Corbb from Level Access told us. “Those are important things to work on, but ultimately the decorative picture that’s on the home page of a couple enjoying the beach is less important to me than being able to use the date picker to pick my next hotel vacation spot, for example.”