EU Accessibility Success

EU Countries have achieved excellent progress in digital accessibility. Collectively, they took practical actions during a ministerial meeting in 2003 towards creating an open knowledge-based society accessible to all citizens by adopting Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) guidelines for all public websites. A 2004 comparative survey^[35] to assess conformance of websites to web accessibility guidelines in four European countries, the United Kingdom, Germany, France and Ireland was developed. The survey included websites from different categories like arts and entertainment, education, government, science and the environment. The overall conformance of Web accessibility guidelines of sampled websites got poor rating. None of the sites satisfied the AAA WCAG level, while only 6% of sites in all four countries met the WCAG–A level. Noticeably, 1% of UK sites passed the AA level while 100% of sites in the other three countries failed to meet. Since adopting the 2006 CRPD, website accessibility improved very clearly. This was evident in the Click-Away Pound research survey conducted in 2016 ^[36] to measure the accessibility of e-commerce websites for persons with disabilities. It clearly showed noticeable improvements in many accessibility issues. The survey reported almost 50% compliance of e-commerce sites with the WCAG2 criteria but with significant inaccessibility issues such as links, poor navigation content, poor access to screen readers and keyboard access.

The recent 2019 survey by the Click-Away Pound, revealed very important setbacks in e-accessibility issues. Despite the fact that more than 7 million people are with access needs (an increase of 1 million people sine 2016 survey), many websites still suffer from accessibility barriers. 66% of surveyed websites have crowded content which hampers navigation by people with needs. Similarly, filling forms, color contrast, text layouts and animated images are still challenging issues with less than 50% compliance. This clearly means that full compliance with WCAG2 is a real challenge.