Accessibility as Compliance Work
The 2025 rush to meet the European Accessibility Act reduced accessibility to a compliance sprint. I’m hopeful that this will now settle into a new benchmark for design and development processes.
The thing that stood out to me in 2025 was accessibility as compliance work.
2025 was the deadline year for harmonizing the European Accessibility Act (EAA) into local legislature. There was panic. There was scrambling to get accessibility statements online. There was considerable chaos.
And then there was nothing: No big breaking news of mass persecution for non-compliance. So most companies just shrugged and moved on.
For the first time since probably the European Web Accessibility Directive (WAD, yes, different thing from the EAA) in 2016, designers and developers were confronted with accessibility as a top-down requirement. And a legal one at that!
And with that came the demand to upskill. Accessibility was suddenly a trendy topic. Nerdy, niche technical accessibility talks could fill rooms because people were scared shitless about the EAA. How delightful!
Accessibility being normalized
I have hope that this panicked knowledge investment will show returns as accessibility knowledge is quietly absorbed into role-specific habits. That doing something “in an accessible way” becomes the norm, instead of the alternate option.
When I started specializing in accessibility, I did so because it seemed like a fairly solvable problem. I have since met people who have been working to solve this “fairly solvable” problem for longer than I have been alive, so there’s that.
From a technical perspective, I’m still convinced that accessibility would be fairly easy to achieve. It’s the systems that are set up against us.
Most mid-career professionals should already possess the skills and research capabilities to build the products they specialized in well. If you are comfortable with your tech stack, that would include knowing how to use it to build accessible components. Standards such as WCAG, Section 508 and ISO/IEC 29138-1:2018 should be benchmarks to test your own craft against.
The goal should be for the accessibility specialization to disappear, to be absorbed into the fundamentals. Not talking about everything because who could ever know everything there is to accessibility? But you know: the basics. The issues that are so simple to fix, it’s borderline embarrassing that no one caught them before they landed on the web. Those should become part of every fundamental skillset.
Accessibility is not “too hard”. It just requires effort beyond the bare minimum.
And if motivated IT professionals don’t get buy-in from their management, accessibility measures beyond the bare legal minimum will default back to being an add-on.
Meanwhile: Don’t forget the human!
We are looking at so much compliance work, we want all the systems and all the design patterns to make sure we don’t publicise anything inaccessible ever again, that we forget the humans in the process.
We shouldn’t do accessibility so the legal department gets to chill; we should do it and are doing it for the people. We do it because it’s the right thing to do.