Shadi Abou-Zahra, the W3C’s accessibility strategy and technology specialist, and I had a chance to talk about EN 301 549. If you’re not familiar, the World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C, is the organization that creates worldwide standards for the web.
Shadi is employed by the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), a division of the W3C that aims to improve web accessibility for users with various disabilities.
He has spent a lot of time helping to develop the European accessibility standard EN 301 549 and is one of the top accessibility thinkers in the world.
For the benefit of those of us who work for US-based organizations, I asked him important questions below to follow our discussion.
What does “digital accessibility” mean?
Basically, achieving digital accessibility means making all electronic items usable. It’s the technological equivalent of a curb cut or a ramp, which is how I frequently equate it to physical accessibility.
Making software, web content, papers, and hardware user-friendly for those with various disabilities is a process known as accessibility. For those using screen readers who are unable to view the screen, one idea may be to provide text equivalents for images.
Another is adding captions to give those who can’t hear the content an audio alternative. Digital accessibility is essential to include persons with disabilities as well as to benefit everyone else as we continue to produce more digital material and goods.
Describe EN 301 549.
Let’s first get things over with. The official title of the document, EN 301 549, is much longer; there is no abbreviation or shorthand for it.
Let’s discuss what it means now. In a nutshell, EN 301 549 is a standard for accessibility that applies to any ICT (Information and Communication Technology).
Almost any digital object you can imagine falls under this category, including computers, smartphones, printers, atms, electronic papers, software, web content, and more.
At EN 301 549, our goal is to establish “harmonized standards for digital accessibility.” A set of norms for Europe, a set for the US, and a set for other nations make no sense at all. We need a set of universal accessibility standards since, by its very nature, the Internet is international and without borders. This will make accessibility more widely available. W3C steps in at this point.
The online content accessibility guidelines (WCAG) from the W3C are now considered to be the industry standard and are included in EN 301 549. The technical specifications for digital accessibility are EN 301 549. The web-related portion of EN 301 549 is actually WCAG version 2.1. The European standard for electronic documents has certain important differences, including additional parts. The W3C working group note “WCAG2ICT” can be used to follow WCAG standards for a document that is not online, such as one that is on a USB drive or is locally stored on your computer.
It is essentially a WCAG interpretation for this situation. For instance, if the color contrast is required, you must ensure that there is enough contrast between the text’s foreground and background and the background on which it is set.
Applying that restriction to websites makes perfect sense, but it also applies to software and documents you use locally, on your personal devices. It makes no sense to suddenly have a set of criteria to publish your document online, but you do if you keep a copy on your hard drive or share it with your coworkers over the intranet.
In those cases, you have a different set of accessibility needs. The distinctions between software, the web, and content are blurring as more universal standards are being developed for all of these many sorts of material.
What does EN 301 549 imply in terms of legal compliance?
Let’s contrast this European norm with a few others you might be familiar with from the US.
For web content, documentation, and software, the technical specifications of Section 508 procurement law in the US correspond to WCAG. Many other policies in the European Union’s member states rely on EN 301 549 in this same way.
The technical standard EN 301 549 enables the European Commission to impose particular policies in diverse settings across Europe.
