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Effective and trustworthy conformance evaluation for WCAG and beyond

Jeroen Hulscher (Logius)

Hidde de Vries (Logius)

TPAC 2025
Kobe, Japan

What is WCAG-EM?

A brief intro

WCAG-EM

Website Accessibility Conformance Evaluation Methodology (WCAG-EM) 1.0

procedure to evaluate websites: how well do they conform to WCAG?
guidance on scope, sample selection, reporting
use on existing websites, or during development
tech agnostic
just a process, no new requirements

WCAG-EM

Workflow diagram that depicts five sequential steps: 1. Define the evaluation scope; 2. Explore the target website; 3. Select a representative sample; 4. Audit the selected sample and 5. Report the findings. Each step has an arrow to the next step, and arrows back to all prior steps. This illustrates how evaluators proceed from one step to the next, and may return to any preceding step in the process as new information is revealed to them during the evaluation process.

What WCAG-EM gives us

a way to establish if a website conforms to WCAG (especially if it's too big to look at everything)
a way to ensure consistency between reports to make them more comparable

What WCAG-EM gives us (Logius)

a way to establish if a website conforms to WCAG (especially if it's too big to look at everything)
a way to ensure consistency between reports to make them more comparable

for us that comparability is helpful, as the Dutch government, like all EU Member States, needs to report yearly on the accessibility of all government websites (8000+ domains we know off)

screenshot of digital accessibility reports dashboard

we even have a public dashboard that shows the data we collect. The input is WCAG-EM based reports.

WCAG-EM 2.0

What we're working on updating

WCAG-EM 2.0

Worked on in the Accessibility Guidelines Working Group (AGWG) for last ~7 months, editors Steve Faulkner (Tetralogical), Hidde de Vries (Logius), Jeroen Hulscher (Logius).

WCAG-EM 2.0

editorial: spec tooling, spelling, language and URI fixes
broader scope
- “sample” → “sample set”
- “web page” → “view”, “sample”
- “web site” → “digital product”

WCAG-EM 2.0: status

Currently getting ready for Draft Note status and getting Report Tool updated.

Gathering ideas for next phase.

Discussion, questions, ideas

ideas for a next version
how to make evaluations more effective?
how to make evaluations more trustworthy?

Where to send feedback

File an issue on GitHub
Join #agwg-wcag-em on Slack
hidde.vries@logius.nl / jeroen.hulscher@logius.nl