New EU rules on digital accessibility to come into force

I never thought to check my banks login pages, as I never had an issue with the loading speed. I had other issues (related to bad bank related service) so I changed a couple of banks.

Current banks login pages are a bit below 3 MB.

I see it as a prioritization issue. Are you happy with your bank services except the size of the (login) pages? Probably they focus on what they should as there would be more customers switching due to bad service than to page sizes. There are probably few scenarios where 10 MB is a problem - most of it should get cached anyhow after the first load.

For banks, they should mandate FinTS/HBCI instead, so folks don't have to use the bank's bloated websites/apps and instead use banking apps that can connect to any bank.

It will be 150mb when accessible due to even more frameworks.

The directive contains lighter requirements for microenterprises, in some cases going as far as not even asking them to make a paper trail and just trust their word for it. Of course it's going to hit micro companies less than big companies, who's going to sue a micro enterprise because the atm isn't designed with accessibility in mind

That’s not true. There’s a whole business industry in Germany for legal buro’s who specialize in basically extorting business into paying for their services to make their websites or compliant .. or be sued and face a 54k euro fine. I personally, decided to stop doing business in Germany altogether because of this. It’s a nightmare for small business.

Yes and No. EU acts are only guidelines and minimal requirements to be implemented by member country governments. There is a problem of gold-plating, overregulation of laws in some countries. In worst cases once you are targeted by audit of law enforcement which may burn all you focus and time, you only dream to close your small business and leave the country.

Sorry but this line of "don't worry buddy, nobody cares about your small company" reasoning is dangerous. No reputable company wants to operate in a legal grey zone. Or do these directives and the corresponding laws explicitly only apply to large corporations?

Edit: I'm not complaining about the regulations in this comment, I'm saying that it's bad advice to ignore them just because you're a small business unless there is an exception for them. As it happens, exceptions for small business are planned.

Sorry, but isn't that something also provided by screen narrators (that are usually meant for visual impairments)?

If a shopping mall refused to build a wheelchair ramp, would you be fine with them not receiving any kind of penalty?

Sometimes you just have to remind people what it means to be a part of a civilized culture with a properly sized stick. Special circumstances.

The honey is that being accessible could increase your possible market up to 10%.

Don't know what you define as small but when you have two million per year turnover and ten employees you should think about complying to the available laws. Since those are the cutoff numbers where below it does not apply.

> But for smaller companies, getting the website/app up to the rules for European Accessibility act can be over their limits, cause it's not an easy task, depending on the type of UI your app is using.

If this leads to better accessibility in the common frameworks or the emergence of more accessible frameworks, it will be a win for every Internet user in the world, though. This is a technical issue that can be fixed.

The opposite, the directive is posed to harmonize a situation introducing a common ground for the states to legiferate in a similar way, helping companies have less work to do to adapt one product to another state laws, I'm quoting the first points of the directive:

The purpose of this Directive is to contribute to the proper functioning of the internal market by approximating laws, regulations and administrative provisions of the Member States as regards accessibility requirements for certain products and services by, in particular, eliminating and preventing barriers to the free movement of certain accessible products and services arising from divergent accessibility requirements in the Member States. This would increase the availability of accessible products and services in the internal market and improve the accessibility of relevant information.

Due to the differences in national accessibility requirements, individual professionals, SMEs and microenterprises in particular are discouraged from entering into business ventures outside their own domestic markets. The national, or even regional or local, accessibility requirements that Member States have put in place currently differ as regards both coverage and level of detail. Those differences negatively affect competitiveness and growth, due to the additional costs incurred in the development and marketing of accessible products and services for each national market.

The approximation of national measures at Union level is therefore necessary for the proper functioning of the internal market in order to put an end to fragmentation in the market of accessible products and services, to create economies of scale, to facilitate cross-border trade and mobility, as well as to help economic operators to concentrate resources on innovation instead of using those resources to cover expenses arising from fragmented legislation across the Union.

I was once talking with the cto of an Ai law startup who made a presentation in university, and he noted that one of the main issue to move to other countries would have been different laws. Of course for the whole law sector that's impossible to harmonize (at least for the time being), but if for some things there can be harmonization, it's a win win for everything

Smaller companies are exempt from those things. In Germany the rule is less than 10 employees or less than 2 million in sales.

I think this is reasonable. What you are writing feels less reasonable.

ADA lawsuits in the US are frequent and often somewhat frivolous, and they probably cost way more than European fines, so I don't think the regulation puts the European software market at a disadvantage. I admit it's bad for small companies, though, when they want to or need to use alternative GUI frameworks (usually, for technical or licensing-related reasons). For instance, I was planning to use Fyne with Go for some small apps, but it has zero accessibility support and is therefore out of question.

The part that you may be missing here is that Europe puts people first. America (in particular, but not exclusively) puts business (or money) first.

The thing of the smaller people always comes up when digital regulations are to be, yet on other industries everyone copes, including street vendors, granted in some countries there is a gray zone in following laws, but still they usually come up.

Also we can follow China's leadership and get our own digital wall.

> Europe has 0 power in online world

The annoying cookie banners prove you wrong.

Most smaller companies aren't in the markets this legislation is written for anyway. This primarily places demands on four types of software/digital products (not a lawyer):

* Banks

* Webshops

* Operating Systems

* Software designed for Communication

The rest is all hardware devices (ATMs n such), public government services (the public transport schedule), relates to TV or isn't software in the first place (ebooks).

Banks and OSes are markets with only a few players and none of them are small. It'll be interesting to see if this on a technical level will demand changes for Wayland, afaik it's story on accessibility is pretty shit still.

Webshops overwhelmingly either use larger third parties as intermediaries (ie. Etsy) or stuff like woocommerce, an off the shelf solution developed by Automattic (who will obviously have to accommodate by updating woocommerce, which they probably will since iirc they offer a commercial solution for woocommerce themselves).

And communication software really is the big one, but most people aren't making new ones of those either. That's gonna be a pain for Slack/Salesforce, Meta, Reddit and so on, but they'll have legal pressure to comply (which opens up a lot more room to accelerate and give money to that sort of thing). If you start out in this market in particular, it'll probably be easy to comply with this regulation "from the ground up", just like how it's pretty easy to not build a data slurper from scratch after the GDPR got passed into law.

The thing they all have in common is that there's relatively few actual competing products.

I do build websites for public sector in Denmark and we are only starting now with accessibility :( I don't know the actual law, but I would be surprised if multiple regions would just ignore them for this long.

And yes, these new laws seems to be aimed for private sector as well.

That depends. I'm perfectly happy as a European business owner that it is made very clear that accessible software is not optional, and even if you think it is expensive, that you can't just sit around and wait for the fine to hit.

The reality is that if you're ignoring this stuff, you are effectively eliminating a significant chunk of the population from participating in public life. It's about as bad as not having wheelchair ramps in public places, except the same software runs everywhere, so it's not the one virtual 'building' missing it, but all buildings made by the same architect.

These penalties are essential to counterbalance the financial trade-off companies often make by deprioritising accessibility. Without serious consequences, it’s rational for executives to cut costs at the expense of inclusion. This ensures accountability at the level where those decisions are made.

This is likely just you who are not too familiar with how law is practiced in the EU.

In the EU the directives define a max range. Eg. 10% of global revenue or 20 million EUR whichever is higher.

Then the court figures out to what extend the company broke the law.

This system is needed to make sure that there are not some member states that are more forgiving and provides a competitive edge for companies to move there.

The possibility of jail-time only exists in Ireland, no other country in the EU. Even there, prison-time is the maximum, not a guarantee. Courts may opt for fines, suspended sentences, or probation, I don't think at any point will anyone go to jail for this, especially considering this is only a possibility after a conviction and repeated non-compliance in important sectors like healthcare, banking or transport.

As far as I can understand the punishments are implemented in a per country basis, I've found only Ireland could put people in prison for that https://reciteme.com/news/european-accessibility-act-fines/

It's discrimination, e.g. the web is perfectly suited to be used with keyboard only, yet companies make it impossible.

Is it because it's digital? For example if a shopping mall would refuse to build a wheelchair ramp / elevator, would you still consider it being excessive?

On the contrary, the history of the last 20 years of capitalism has been that of nobody in charge going to jail no matter what they do. 2008 meltdown, billions of people suffered but not one administrator, trader, or CEO went to jail. Big companies from oil to tech also routinely get caught in fraud or anticompetitive behaviour and—again—nobody gets jailed, the company merely gets fined a fraction of what they earned due to their behaviour, which obviously is no deterrent.

it's not overreach, it's deliberate racketeering. fining American companies is a non-insignificant chunk of EU budget at this point, so new nebulous laws and rules need to be invented to keep the racket up.

I rather have this than capitalism takes everything.

I'm blind - ai can help with some stuff, not with other. my favorite is the lack of labels on buttons or text that is supposed to be a table but is not marked as such. the ai should be able to get inside the page code and rewrite it into something usable which is let's say a heavy ask for most ai-s nowadays. the thing must get an enormous context of react js and apply surgical changes on the regular. maybe possible, but heavy, slow, and expensive, and every blind person will have to do it separately.

The better option is for the ai to review the code during development and suggest suitable accessibility measures compared to the spec and common guidelines.