European Accessibility Act 2025
A huge problem for many elderly, illiterate people, and those for whom the online world is challenging due to a disability or condition…? Thankfully, there is the European Accessibility Act (EAA) 2025, a European law that helps ensure everyone in the EU can participate in economic and social life without barriers. Compliance with the EAA will be mandatory from 2025 for commercial companies, manufacturers, and digital service providers. For public institutions and government services, the EAA expands on the obligations they have already been meeting under the Web Accessibility Directive (WAD). The EAA is based on the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) of the World Wide Web Consortium – quite a mouthful.
Accessible to Everyone
At us., digital accessibility has been a top priority for years. The goal is to ensure all websites comply with the WCAG AA guidelines: the global standard for good accessibility. These guidelines address content perceptibility, operability, understandability of functionalities, and “robustness”: does it work on every device, now and in the future? Wies, a senior developer at us. and an accessibility expert, states: “Making the web more accessible is not just a good thing for people with disabilities. As UX designers and developers, we must ensure that everyone can effectively navigate what’s online. And there’s still plenty to improve.”
As UX designers and developers, we must ensure that everyone can effectively navigate what’s online.
Making Progress Together
Fortunately, we at us. have clients like SIDN who, like us, strongly advocate for online accessibility. Together with them, we are making significant strides. “As a digital product partner, we create the conditions,” says Wies. “We lay the foundation for optimal accessibility, but the client, as a content provider, must also take action. At SIDN, they take this role very seriously, and we can advise them well in this regard; this allows us to make great progress together regarding the accessibility of the SIDN websites.”
Order Button
Nicole Wedler, a communications specialist at SIDN: “We had our website sidn.nl fully checked against the WCAG AA, and we got to work with the action points from the audit report. Then you realize how many details you need to pay attention to. For example, if you don’t give a link in the text the correct label, screen reader users won’t know where the link leads. If a button changes color on mouse-over, the same users won’t notice if you haven’t labeled it. These are all things you’re usually not consciously aware of. I recently saw someone with a visual impairment trying to order a theme park ticket with a screen reader. No matter what he did, he couldn’t reach the ‘Order’ button. It wasn’t coded and therefore wasn’t recognized as an order button.”
A Big Task
The technical adjustments are handled by us. for SIDN, but Nicole Wedler also sees a role for her own team. “Adjusting PDFs, for example, has a significant impact on us. PDFs require a separate code layer to be readable by screen readers, but it’s even better to move away from PDFs entirely. We are now converting the most important PDFs into HTML pages with a PDF print button. This way, the text is accessible to everyone, but it also meets the legal requirements for the content to be printable in PDF form.” Nicole and her team also work on simplifying text and graphical representations. “For a more complex graph, we can make the information more accessible by adding a simple table, for example. These are small steps, but implementing them consistently is a big task. We are also investigating whether we need to adjust our house style for accessibility. It’s very colorful, which means text on certain buttons doesn’t have the correct color contrast. This doesn’t help readability, just as text on a photo can be problematic. We encounter these issues, and it can be quite impactful.”
These are small steps, but implementing them consistently is a big task.
Accessibility as Second Nature
As seen with the SIDN website(s), making online products optimally accessible is especially challenging when it involves modifying existing platforms, as with SIDN and many other organizations. Wies: “Everything that is being developed now is built according to the WCAG AA standard. For us as developers, working according to the WCAG is increasingly becoming second nature. You can see that accessibility is now part of the curriculum in UX design education, just like privacy and security. As an accessibility specialist, I ensure that all teams at us. know what is expected of them and that developers know exactly what to look out for.”
A Carefree Digital Life
The EAA will come into effect next year, but even without this new European legislation, accessibility is a hot topic for SIDN. “Our mission is to create a promising and carefree digital life for everyone,” says Nicole. “The least we can do is make sure our own websites are accessible to everyone. But we go further. The SIDN fund has just launched a call to promote digital inclusion by supporting initiatives that help people participate in the digital society. Previously, they supported the development of the Appt app, which tests apps for accessibility. As the manager of the .nl domain, we definitely see a role for ourselves in encouraging organizations to become accessible. Having a partner like us. is absolutely helpful in this regard, as we are completely aligned on this important theme.”
The official version of WCAG can be found at: Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1.