I promise this is not a long history lesson, but I'd like to go back briefly to where this comes from, in our context. A lot of where we are now has its roots in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948 by UN General Assembly.
Of course all human beings includes human beings with disabilities, but it wasn't until more than half a century later that the UN created the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. It was signed on behalf of EU countries in 2007 and got into force in 2011.
It is legally binding and sets minimum standards, European Commission reports back to UN regularly
It is ratified in most places, including Europe, where we are based.
One part of the implementation of UNCRPD was to introduce regulation, WAD and EAA.
And that brings me back to my organisation and why I'm here… it explains why we're interested in WCAG and specifically evaluating WCAG methodogically.
And that brings me back to my organisation and why I'm here… it explains why we're interested in WCAG and specifically evaluating WCAG methodologically.
How many websites in an org?
I live in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, and as a city, that is one of the many hundreds of organisations that fall under the WAD. For illustration purposes, this is not a real list of their websites, just to show the type of websites they may have.
This is their own website
this one is about rubbish collection, when they come to collect. May be a SaaS tool
this one is lost & found items, which in NL is a responsibility of city governments to deal with… long story…
this is the city archive's page… they hired an agency as they didnt feel their work would belong on the main city website.
this is the visit Rotterdam website, they really want people to come visit and hired a marketing agency to do this one. It runs on a funky new CMS.
this is the website with all the meeting notes of the city council's meetings. There's a couple of vendors in the country that provides systems for it, they picked one.
I'm not sure if you're familiar with Eurovision Song Contest here? We hosted it a couple of years ago; of course it needed a website too. A temporary one, flashy… more budget for shiny details than for accessibility
I could go on and on… of course there's a jobs website, if you want to work for the city this has the job ads and pictures of people hard at work. Different agency, connects to the HR system…
Last example… well… there's an app to report stuff, ReportR…
So all in all there's a lot of properties. I looked it up and they actually have 122 websites and apps. They'll have different CMSes, product managers… some may be done by an agency, others by internal teams, others directly bought of the shelf from a supplier.
If these are the sites they are responsible for, and again, this is fictional just to illustrate, they would have to show a report based on WCAG-EM to say what this is.
…
What happens in Europe with regulation is that the European Commission will request standards that can bring “presumption of conformity”. If your product conforms to the standard, it can be presumed it complies with the regulation. They are voluntary though, you are free to to whatever else, but it will be harder for you to show you comply.
EN 301 549, version 3.2.1, is that standard for WAD, version 4.1.1 will be that standard for EAA.
We are updating to version 2.0, the examples in this presentation will use the wording from 2.0
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)
So to return to what I talked about earlier… Dutch public sector bodies are reporting with these kinds of reports, they'll have one for each of websites and apps.
we even have a public dashboard that shows the data we collect. The input is WCAG-EM based reports.
Organisations (and everyone in the public) can see how many domains they're responsible for. This is an example of our own org, because yeah, we're also a public sector body. We own 65 websites and apps. They all comply wiht the law, as they have A, B or C status. The A means fully meets WCAG, B means it was evaluated and fixes are known / being worked on, C means an evaluation was planned.
It shows how we did over time, with bar charts per month in months that had changes. In 2024 we still had a few websites and apps that we didn't look into.
It also has a way to compare how this organisation is doing compared to other organisations of the same type. So cities can compare with other cities, provinces with other provinces, and we, an agency, with other agencies.
There is a long list of results, it shows how many WCAG criteria were met per website or app, there are also CSVs available.
“sample” → “sample set”
