- Welcome to The State of Accessibility podcast from TPGi LinkedIn Live. I am Mark Miller, and this is my co-host, Dr. David Sloan, Chief Accessibility Officer for TPGi, co-author of "What Every Engineer Should Know About Digital Accessibility," and a user research and Accessibility strategy specialist. - And Mark is the sales director for TPGi, and a member of W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative Accessibility Maturity Model task force. Happy new year to everyone. And we shortened our introductions for this year, just to give us more time to talk about good stuff. - There we go. Which is good. We should be talking about good stuff. Happy 2025. David, it's great to be jumping into the new year with a, continuing the podcast live on LinkedIn, and doing it with you. - Yeah, and it seems like we're returning to a topic that we've already chatted about a few times in this podcast, and it's still drawing a lot of attention, the European Accessibility Act. Before this podcast started, we were talking about football, like both American football and the round ball game. And in the round ball game, everyone talks about VAR, the video assistant referee. It's all anybody wants to talk about. And that seems like the football or soccer equivalent of the EAA in Accessibility. We can't stop talking about it. So if we do another podcast this month, then we can maybe shift onto other things. But I suspect, EAA, it will still be a hot topic right through the year. - My favorite part about that analogy was identifying the real football, European football as the round ball football. That was brilliant. But I get your point. I think that, and it's, I mean, we know there's a deadline coming up this year. It's just such, it is a really important subject, so there is no surprise that we keep coming back to it. With that, let's dive right into it, right? And the way that we're gonna do this today is we've got some questions around the EAA, that we thought we would tackle and address in this podcast. So I'm gonna give you the question, David, and then you can dive in, and we can kinda go back and forth from there. Plan? - [David] Sure. - All right, beautiful. - [David] Yeah, sounds good. - Okay, so the first question that I wanna cover here is, there has been some discussion recently on social media about EAA and its relationship to technical Accessibility standards such as WCAG. So what does EAA require in terms of conformance? And I think this is a really good question because I think it's super, super simple, and super, super complicated all at the same time. And that's why this even exists. - Yeah, I think that's a, it's a perfect summary. Simple and complex. It's complex because it's simple, and it can be made simple out of the complexity. - Simple because it's complex. Yeah, exactly. - [David] Yes. - You know what, I think we're done. I think we just covered it all out. We covered it. No, no, no, go ahead. - I guess, you know, like a lot of Accessibility related legislation and regulations. EAA doesn't mention compliance with specific Accessibility standards in its requirements. And it's a good thing because it doesn't tie it to something that becomes obsolete. You know, we've seen elsewhere, like section 508 in the US, it sort of referenced by WCAG one for a long time after WCAG two is published. So you were dealing with some outdated guidance. And even now, section 508 still references version 2.0 of WCAG instead of more recent versions. So not having embedded technical references means it's future looking, and it also gives some kind of flexibility about how to interpret it. So the EAA's requirements, and they're all set out in Annex one of the text of the EAA. They're more high level, but they do mention require making websites and mobile apps perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust. And they are familiar to anyone who knows about WCAG. They're the sort of structural founding principles of WCAG. So that's a bit of a clue that WCAG's gonna help you toward EAA conformance, even if it's not the be all and end all. And I think back to a talk that Susanna Laurin, one of the leading figures in Digital Accessibility in the EU took part in, along with Lainey Feingold, back at M-Enabling in October last year, where Susanna said that EAA's requirements, one of the best ways to sum up what you need to do is products and services must be designed and produced in such a way as to maximize their foreseeable use by persons with disabilities. Which is great in a couple of ways because it talks about use, maximizing use. So it's a usability thing. And also foreseeable use as a sort of future looking thing. You're sort of anticipating how would you expect somebody to be able to use this product or service over time, and how can you design to make sure that that happens. So that's, you know, it's a real, a strong clue that ultimately you're judged on whether somebody can use a product, which is how it should be. - Right. - Rather than conforming to a technical standard, which is part of the process, but not all of it. So yeah, we've got flexibility in terms of how to meet the requirements, and conforming to standards helps you towards that goal. But it's also, well, it's technically correct to say that EAA doesn't directly reference specific standards. That lack of precision could be potentially confusing or unhelpful, especially for organizing, organizations that are relatively new to Accessibility. - Right. - So it's still worth aligning Accessibility efforts around a technical Accessibility baseline, and then going from there. And you had a really good analogy with that, with the car maintenance and- - Yeah. Yeah, I think, I mean, I think it's an, it's just, it's a really important discussion, and this is the complexity within the simplicity. And it doesn't, EAA seems very different than the ADA here in the US, but a lot of things as they sift out really are similar. And this is one of 'em because there is nowhere in title three of ADA that it says that you need to conform to the WCAG guidelines. It says that anything public facing needs to be usable by people with disabilities, to paraphrase. And it's because we, our method of governance really is the court systems and settlements. And in the precedent that exists right now, the WCAG guidelines are referenced quite a bit. So in EAA you sort of have a similar situation, and you've gotta, it's sort of like, it's a couple of steps removed from WCAG, but it still references WCAG, and it references 301549, which talks about, you know? So there's a lot there. But the idea, I think the danger is to say, well, geez, you know, if it needs to be usable, let's ignore the guidelines. Let's ignore WCAG, right? And you kind of hear people at least speculate whether or not that that's what they should be doing. And I think the answer is no. And here's the analogy. Right, here's the analogy. What the guidelines do is they give everybody a consistent way to look at their digital assets, their digital properties, to understand what it means to have a baseline of Accessibility, right? And so if you start to look at usability before you even have that baseline, it could end up being a disaster. And the analogy is, it would be like saying, hey, let's look at how well this car drives, and that everything is properly operable for a person with a disability when the car doesn't have wheels on it, or won't start, or the brakes are locked up, or the steering wheel doesn't work. So bringing it to a mechanic and saying, "Hey, can you inspect my car? Can you see if it passes an inspection?" 'Cause an inspection doesn't cover everything, right? But it says this is, it's drivable, and it's relatively safe to drive. So now you know that the wheels are on it, the brakes aren't locked up, the steering wheel can go. You can signal, you know, signal, and the stoplights, and these things that are important for safety work. And then now you can start saying, geez, does it seem to, you know, does it seem to slip in third gear? Does it seem to sputter a little bit? Does it seem to, you know, steer hard one way or the other? Does it, you know, do we not feel like we're getting full power outta the engine? You know, does it stall out at a stoplight, you know? Like these things that we may consider that it's not a very usable vehicle compared to what we would consider it to be a usable vehicle, but it's at least in a condition where we can go take a test drive and figure all that out. And somebody can, and to me, you know, test drive analogous to usability, user study. Grab this website, test drive this website. See if you screen reader user can perceive everything on the website with, you know, an equivalency to somebody who would use a keyboard mouse, and have vision, and use a monitor. So that's kind of the analogy for me is that people do need something to make sure that they're at least at a minimal baseline. And then I think the wonderful point everybody is making is that is not a stopping point. You can't get to that technical conformance to something like the WCAG guidelines, or you shouldn't, and say, we've done it. High five, everybody. What you can say is like, let's try and maintain that. Let's start there, right? Let's put a long-term program in place that'll maintain that, and let's look at how to go beyond this. And of course, that, in my opinion, even getting to that point, particularly beyond that point, is should involve people with disabilities. You should, you know, you wanna hear from the driver how well the car runs, right? - [David] Yeah. - Not a passenger, not a somebody else, from the person actually driving the car. - Yeah, I think that's a great point. I mean, the standards we have aren't perfect, and they don't cover all possible user needs, and they're, by nature they're general. You know, they have to cover a wide range of context. So for a specific type of service, for a specific audience and a specific context, you're gonna have to do some more work to figure out what success looks like. But the standards that we have are what our best minds in Accessibility have agreed on based on data, based on research, based on evidence. And for all their shortcomings and for all they continually need to be evolved. Like new discoveries of user needs and new technologies, they're still really useful in pointing in the right direction. And you make a really good point about if you are evaluating a prototype you're building and you want to get feedback from people with disabilities, it's really important to try and iron out Accessibility barriers that you could inspect before doing that user research. You don't need a screen reader user to tell you that there's an image with a missing alt text on it. The standards tell you to add a text equivalent for an image that writes context. So do that. So- - And in that screen reader user can say, hey, I got the idea here, because you had alt text. It would've been better though if the alt text said this, or guided in this way, or- - Exactly, yeah. - And so now you have something to work with and refine. - Yeah, it's validating that the quality of the alternative text you provided is sufficient to allow somebody to be successful using that functionality for whatever purpose it's provided. So yeah, definitely. You know, I think it's still important to use standards for their intended purpose, providing that baseline you talked about, and evaluating, designing with those standards, evaluating against the standards, fixing the issues, and then repeat that process as you improve Accessibility and usability over time. But yeah, the real danger is that people interpret EAA is only requiring that technical conformance, and then they maybe even give up on other activities that they thought about doing that are more oriented towards providing usable products and services for disabled people. So it is really essential to involve disabled people as much as possible in user experience research, and design activities, and conducting usability testing with people with a range of disabilities is a big part of that.