8 ms·

New EU rules on digital accessibility to come into force

59 points by austinallegro 1y ago

Hendrikto 1y ago
> If companies fail to comply with the European Accessibility Act they could be hit with fines and even prison sentences for senior staff. That seems extremely excessive. A prime example of regulatory overreach.
- superice 1y ago
  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.
- tossandthrow 1y ago
  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.
  - ryanjshaw 1y ago
    A prison sentence for not providing captions on an OF video isn’t overreach? I’m not sure if I’m being hyperbolic or not, the article didn’t go into any meaningful depth.
    - riffraff 1y ago
      I bet you a beer nobody will go to jail for not captioning an onlyfans video, because that is not how regulations work. There is a range of fines, and a minor non-repeat infringement will obviously not get you the maximum penalty. But consider the case where a person cannot book a medical appointment, or ask a refund, or claim insurance. The company will be fined, and if the offense does not get fixed than _at some point_ the responsible person may face jail time.
      - noirscape 1y ago
        To given an idea, one of the more relevant lawsuits on the GDPR was about linking to Google Fonts/Google CDN resources on a blog. The judge in that case held that doing so is a privacy violation since the webpage now connects to Google without the users' consent. Total fine? €150. An extremely token amount because the blog owner obviously didn't intend to break the law. Quite the contrast to the million dollar fines you hear about for big tech companies.
    - guappa 1y ago
      According to you blind people have no right to a bank account?
    - Mordisquitos 1y ago
      This is the first time I've heard about these new rules on EU digital accessibility and yet I am absolutely sure that you are being hyperbolic about "a prison sentence for not providing captions on an OF video". Assume good faith.
      - paganel 1y ago
        [flagged]
    - edent 1y ago
      Do you understand how laws work? Laws are not computer code. They're not run, unthinkingly, by a judge acting as a CPU. We have humans (like juries) looking to see whether an offence was committed. Are they going to find someone guilty of an offence like this? Then we have judges who look at the whole facts of a case to determine a sentence[0]. Would they think it proportionate for a first-time offender to be imprisoned for this? On the other hand, if a large content creator has been repeatedly warned not to break the law and they've ignored those warnings, why shouldn't they be punished? [0] Yes, some jurisdictions have sentencing guidelines and mandatory minimums.
- inigoalonso 1y ago
  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.
  - dataflow 1y ago
    > 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. You can impose arbitrarily high financial penalties, or even shut down the business, and that's plenty enough for the incentives to tilt in the correct direction. But prison? How the heck is that necessary for this?
- Akashic101 1y ago
  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.
- amarcheschi 1y ago
  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/ https://reciteme.com/news/european-accessibility-act-fines/
- rado 1y ago
  It's discrimination, e.g. the web is perfectly suited to be used with keyboard only, yet companies make it impossible.
- andrepd 1y ago
  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.
- Mashimo 1y ago
  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?
- pjmlp 1y ago
  I rather have this than capitalism takes everything.
- 123yawaworht456 1y ago
  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.
dr_dshiv 1y ago
Can AI make inaccessible websites accessible from a consumer end? Why or why not?
- calgoo 1y ago
  First thought that comes to mind, the AI will modify the content, do what the user sees is not the same as what others see. So how can you garantee that the AI does not mess up on some part of content ?
- herrherrmann 1y ago
  I wouldn’t even use AI to generate image descriptions (because it doesn’t have enough context to convey the meaning, aside from being wrong many times). Designers and developers should see it as part of their trade to build inclusive products, not try to patch it up as an afterthought with Accessibility overlays or AI-based “fixes”.
- boudin 1y ago
  Whether AI would be a good solution or not, it then pushes the cost to the consumer which would be unfair and create disparities.
- phartenfeller 1y ago
  It can definetly help, like with describing images that have no description. But I doubt it can deliver good and consistent results to make whole websites accessible where developer have paid no attention to this topic at all. From an efficiency standpoint it would be way better when devs run this once and not every visitor.
- Mashimo 1y ago
  Automated caption for videos is probably something that .. somewhat works.
- sebiol 1y ago
  You can certainly use AI to tick boxes. Need a caption on an image or video? AI will generte it for you! But the quality is a different question. Is the caption correct? Is the caption usefull? In my test with images it was roughly 60/40 on the correctness. On the other hand. If you force a company to provide those captions. They might use the cheapest provider. If they do a better job is anyones guess.
snickerdoodle12 1y ago
Isn't it the job of the User Agent to ensure the User can interact with the content? It's a bit odd you could get sent to prison if your website can't be used by e.g. a blind person, but it's perfectly fine if it can't be used by someone without disabilities.
- Mashimo 1y ago
  Who or what is the User Agent in this context? The browser for websites? I'm not sure I quite understand what you are getting at. If you are company with more then 2 million EUR in profit, and you build a website for Transportation tickets, just add proper HTML tags so screenreads work. That is the gist if it.
  - snickerdoodle12 1y ago
    The browser is the user agent. However browsers are lacking in the accessibility department, so instead we have to do all these weird hacks to make it work for them.
tonis2 1y ago
I'm all for making the apps / websites that are essential for disabled people accessible. 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. So their only option is just to avoid Europen market, if they don't want to go to jail. And European Software marked will be left behind even more. Europe has 0 power in online world and they keep it like that by making dumb rules everyday.
- ahofmann 1y ago
  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.
- kergonath 1y ago
  > 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.
- jonathanstrange 1y ago
  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.
- consp 1y ago
  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.
reconnecting 1y ago
It seems to me that the article does not correctly define who this law targets. The actual regulation is about [1]: - computers and operating systems - ATMs, ticketing and check-in machines - smartphones - TV equipment related to digital television services - telephony services and related equipment - access to audio-visual media services such as television broadcast and related consumer equipment - services related to air, bus, rail and waterborne passenger transport - banking services - e-books - e-commerce For my part, I would dream of this regulation mandating backward support for browsers at least seven years back to stop the nowadays framework madness. As a great example, my bank login page is 10MB. [1] https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/policies/justice-and-fundamental-rights/disability/union-equality-strategy-rights-persons-disabilities-2021-2030/european-accessibility-act_en https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/policies/ju...
- adwawdawd 1y ago
  It will be 150mb when accessible due to even more frameworks.
  - Mashimo 1y ago
    is that not mostly defined in the HTML part?
  - ahofmann 1y ago
    This is unhinged FUD. I have some websites, that needs to adhere to the new rules. It was fairly easy to do. One of them is a react app with mantine components. I was done in less than a day and have not changed the asset size at all.
  - Piraty 1y ago
    less javascript + less dynamically loaded/changed content is the solution to web accessibility
    - chrisldgk 1y ago
      Tell that to the developers that are 5 years, 1 million lines and 500 TODOs deep into their legacy React banking frontend. Adding stuff on top of your existing hacks is easy, taking unnecessary code away is hard. Especially if all your training on web accessibility was a one-day workshop where you never actually learned how to do anything, only why you need to do it. Source: I used a frontend developer working on a big bank frontend. The existing UI stack was horrendous and deadlines and bank politics wouldn’t allow you to refactor anything. Just build shit on top and hope that Jenga tower of a web application doesn’t fall apart halfway there.
Liquidor 1y ago
Uhm hasn't this been the case since 2019-2022 or somewhere close to those years? In Denmark we had a year to make government/public apps fully accessible and the same for websites and documents presented on websites. We also had to create accessibility certificates and dedicated pages on the websites to prove and clarify the state of the accessibility (or lack of, together with a statement of what's being done to remedy the issues). Are these "new" EU laws for a different sector (private?) or something else? I can't find any references in the article. I may be blind (pun intended).
- Mashimo 1y ago
  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.
mrtksn 1y ago
I'm sure this will freak out many indie developers, but relax this doesn't affect you. Just yesterday I stumbled upon a developer video from Germany who was trying to build some AI RAG SaaS for small businesses and was completely overwhelmed with the EU Privacy and data protection regulations and was stuttering when was talking about going to jail for using OpenAI API the wrong way. Just Wow. These things are not for you, nobody is going to jail for their app or paying life ruining fines in Europe as long as they don't actually cause real harm. All those rules and regulations are intended for large companies who abuse their power or harm large parts of the society by ignoring stuff when not making them profit.
- jonathanstrange 1y ago
  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.
  - mrtksn 1y ago
    Any examples of indie devs burned by that danger? Don't do shady stuff and you will be fine and if you do shady stuff and push for edge cases and interpretation ambiguities to run your business then study the laws in details and lawyer up. The basics are simple enough to run a legit business. There are some obvious and basic data protection requirements but I wouldn't call a gray zone unless pushing for it. Also, there's no EU police checking apps for violations etc. You don't just get sued the moment your app hits the App Store.
  - ahofmann 1y ago
    There is no legal grey zone. Just read the law. In Germany it's the BFSG (Barrierefreiheitsstärkungsgesetz) and it is much more pleasant than this monster of a word let's you assume. It mainly boils down to: write ARIA tags and adhere to WCAG version 2.1 level AA.
ilioscio 1y ago
Punishing groups for failing to implement accessability seems drastic, isn't there some to spurn them to action with incentivization instead? You catch more flies with honey..
- baq 1y ago
  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.
- Mashimo 1y ago
  If a shopping mall refused to build a wheelchair ramp, would you be fine with them not receiving any kind of penalty?
  - ilioscio 1y ago
    I think it's better to make these decisions in measured ways, rather than broad sweeping generalities, a shopping mall should have multiple motivations to build a wheelchair ramp before 'penalties' are used. I'm not inherently against enforcing accessibility, but it sucks to go for punishments as a first course of action.
- phillipseamore 1y ago
  The honey is that being accessible could increase your possible market up to 10%.
  - ilioscio 1y ago
    If that's true then the punishments aren't really needed?
lobito25 1y ago
Do adult websites also need to implement this? For example, captions on adult videos?
adwawdawd 1y ago
[flagged]
- ahofmann 1y ago
  This is also FUD. Please stop it. The law is for disabled people who need to use important tools online. It is not about some guy who tries to sell his music.
  - adwawdawd 1y ago
    Thanks for the clarifications, I hope you are right and this won't be abused. I recall a website pushing pictures into the "license free" section of google images and then suing other websites reusing them for copyright infringement.
- cdmckay 1y ago
  None of the penalties are jail time and microenterprises (<10 employees) are exempt. There’s also a disproportionate burden clause that would also probably exempt you.
  - adwawdawd 1y ago
    Thanks for clarifying!
- Mashimo 1y ago
  Are you making more than 2 million EUR in profit? And I also don't see anything related to music, the closes I can see is "audio-visual media services such as television broadcast" What are you on about? This is target against big cooperation, so a blind person can buy a bus ticket online.
  - adwawdawd 1y ago
    I wrote the website my music is hosted on (an audio visual media service) using Godot. How am I supposed to make that accessible? But I didn't know about the limits, which would make it okay in my case.
lobito25 1y ago
Do adult websites also need to implement this? For example, captions on videos?
- Mashimo 1y ago
  Mhhh, maybe? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44394684 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44394684 > - access to audio-visual media services such as television broadcast and related consumer equipment But only if your adult website makes more than 2 million EUR in profit.
- dominicrose 1y ago
  I'm guessing it's a joke because good luck trying to regulate these websites, even the bigger ones. France, and maybe other countries is trying to but fails to protect minors from these websites.
pabe 1y ago
These rules don't apply to businesses that make less than 2.000.000€ a year and have less than 10 employees and don't create physical products.
zerof1l 1y ago
There's a German version that has nice FAQ and is written in a more human friendly way going into all the details. You can use Google translate https://bfsg-gesetz.de/#faq https://bfsg-gesetz.de/#faq I'm very interested in how they've implemented Google Analytics. No external JS is loaded, just 9KB of packed JS embedded implementing a minimal call... and then it is being sent to their own script analytics4.php which acts like MITM. Does anyone know the name of the plugin or package they are using?
rickydroll 1y ago
I read the article and I feel unseen, invisible. It is yet another accessibility initiative that assumes users fit into the 'blind' or 'not blind' categories. There's never a mention of people needing speech recognition or any other physical mobility aid. Keyboard shortcuts are not enough. I should be able to navigate a webpage completely by speech. The actual speech UI would take some thinking. You want both absolute by name and relative references, as in "follow that link," "third link back," "follow threads", and " follow new," as a bare minimum.
- Avamander 1y ago
  Sorry, but isn't that something also provided by screen narrators (that are usually meant for visual impairments)?
butz 1y ago
First good way to improve accessibility is to remove cookie banners, especially those that pop out after a while after website loads.
zihotki 1y ago
I'm european and I wonder how that would be enforced especially for non-EU e-commerce. I also wonder if these aria tags would help writing adblock expressions

59 points by austinallegro 1y ago

> If companies fail to comply with the European Accessibility Act they could be hit with fines and even prison sentences for senior staff. That seems extremely excessive. A prime example of regulatory overreach.

superice 1y ago
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.
tossandthrow 1y ago
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.
- ryanjshaw 1y ago
  A prison sentence for not providing captions on an OF video isn’t overreach? I’m not sure if I’m being hyperbolic or not, the article didn’t go into any meaningful depth.
  - riffraff 1y ago
    I bet you a beer nobody will go to jail for not captioning an onlyfans video, because that is not how regulations work. There is a range of fines, and a minor non-repeat infringement will obviously not get you the maximum penalty. But consider the case where a person cannot book a medical appointment, or ask a refund, or claim insurance. The company will be fined, and if the offense does not get fixed than _at some point_ the responsible person may face jail time.
    - noirscape 1y ago
      To given an idea, one of the more relevant lawsuits on the GDPR was about linking to Google Fonts/Google CDN resources on a blog. The judge in that case held that doing so is a privacy violation since the webpage now connects to Google without the users' consent. Total fine? €150. An extremely token amount because the blog owner obviously didn't intend to break the law. Quite the contrast to the million dollar fines you hear about for big tech companies.
  - guappa 1y ago
    According to you blind people have no right to a bank account?
  - Mordisquitos 1y ago
    This is the first time I've heard about these new rules on EU digital accessibility and yet I am absolutely sure that you are being hyperbolic about "a prison sentence for not providing captions on an OF video". Assume good faith.
    - paganel 1y ago
      [flagged]
  - edent 1y ago
    Do you understand how laws work? Laws are not computer code. They're not run, unthinkingly, by a judge acting as a CPU. We have humans (like juries) looking to see whether an offence was committed. Are they going to find someone guilty of an offence like this? Then we have judges who look at the whole facts of a case to determine a sentence[0]. Would they think it proportionate for a first-time offender to be imprisoned for this? On the other hand, if a large content creator has been repeatedly warned not to break the law and they've ignored those warnings, why shouldn't they be punished? [0] Yes, some jurisdictions have sentencing guidelines and mandatory minimums.
inigoalonso 1y ago
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.
- dataflow 1y ago
  > 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. You can impose arbitrarily high financial penalties, or even shut down the business, and that's plenty enough for the incentives to tilt in the correct direction. But prison? How the heck is that necessary for this?
Akashic101 1y ago
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.
amarcheschi 1y ago
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/ https://reciteme.com/news/european-accessibility-act-fines/
rado 1y ago
It's discrimination, e.g. the web is perfectly suited to be used with keyboard only, yet companies make it impossible.
andrepd 1y ago
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.
Mashimo 1y ago
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?
pjmlp 1y ago
I rather have this than capitalism takes everything.
123yawaworht456 1y ago
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.

dr_dshiv 1y ago

Can AI make inaccessible websites accessible from a consumer end? Why or why not?

calgoo 1y ago
First thought that comes to mind, the AI will modify the content, do what the user sees is not the same as what others see. So how can you garantee that the AI does not mess up on some part of content ?
herrherrmann 1y ago
I wouldn’t even use AI to generate image descriptions (because it doesn’t have enough context to convey the meaning, aside from being wrong many times). Designers and developers should see it as part of their trade to build inclusive products, not try to patch it up as an afterthought with Accessibility overlays or AI-based “fixes”.
boudin 1y ago
Whether AI would be a good solution or not, it then pushes the cost to the consumer which would be unfair and create disparities.
phartenfeller 1y ago
It can definetly help, like with describing images that have no description. But I doubt it can deliver good and consistent results to make whole websites accessible where developer have paid no attention to this topic at all. From an efficiency standpoint it would be way better when devs run this once and not every visitor.
Mashimo 1y ago
Automated caption for videos is probably something that .. somewhat works.
sebiol 1y ago
You can certainly use AI to tick boxes. Need a caption on an image or video? AI will generte it for you! But the quality is a different question. Is the caption correct? Is the caption usefull? In my test with images it was roughly 60/40 on the correctness. On the other hand. If you force a company to provide those captions. They might use the cheapest provider. If they do a better job is anyones guess.

snickerdoodle12 1y ago

Isn't it the job of the User Agent to ensure the User can interact with the content? It's a bit odd you could get sent to prison if your website can't be used by e.g. a blind person, but it's perfectly fine if it can't be used by someone without disabilities.

Mashimo 1y ago
Who or what is the User Agent in this context? The browser for websites? I'm not sure I quite understand what you are getting at. If you are company with more then 2 million EUR in profit, and you build a website for Transportation tickets, just add proper HTML tags so screenreads work. That is the gist if it.
- snickerdoodle12 1y ago
  The browser is the user agent. However browsers are lacking in the accessibility department, so instead we have to do all these weird hacks to make it work for them.

tonis2 1y ago

I'm all for making the apps / websites that are essential for disabled people accessible. 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. So their only option is just to avoid Europen market, if they don't want to go to jail. And European Software marked will be left behind even more. Europe has 0 power in online world and they keep it like that by making dumb rules everyday.

ahofmann 1y ago
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.
kergonath 1y ago
> 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.
jonathanstrange 1y ago
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.
consp 1y ago
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.

reconnecting 1y ago

It seems to me that the article does not correctly define who this law targets. The actual regulation is about [1]: - computers and operating systems - ATMs, ticketing and check-in machines - smartphones - TV equipment related to digital television services - telephony services and related equipment - access to audio-visual media services such as television broadcast and related consumer equipment - services related to air, bus, rail and waterborne passenger transport - banking services - e-books - e-commerce For my part, I would dream of this regulation mandating backward support for browsers at least seven years back to stop the nowadays framework madness. As a great example, my bank login page is 10MB. [1] https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/policies/justice-and-fundamental-rights/disability/union-equality-strategy-rights-persons-disabilities-2021-2030/european-accessibility-act_en https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/policies/ju...

adwawdawd 1y ago
It will be 150mb when accessible due to even more frameworks.
- Mashimo 1y ago
  is that not mostly defined in the HTML part?
- ahofmann 1y ago
  This is unhinged FUD. I have some websites, that needs to adhere to the new rules. It was fairly easy to do. One of them is a react app with mantine components. I was done in less than a day and have not changed the asset size at all.
- Piraty 1y ago
  less javascript + less dynamically loaded/changed content is the solution to web accessibility
  - chrisldgk 1y ago
    Tell that to the developers that are 5 years, 1 million lines and 500 TODOs deep into their legacy React banking frontend. Adding stuff on top of your existing hacks is easy, taking unnecessary code away is hard. Especially if all your training on web accessibility was a one-day workshop where you never actually learned how to do anything, only why you need to do it. Source: I used a frontend developer working on a big bank frontend. The existing UI stack was horrendous and deadlines and bank politics wouldn’t allow you to refactor anything. Just build shit on top and hope that Jenga tower of a web application doesn’t fall apart halfway there.

Liquidor 1y ago

Uhm hasn't this been the case since 2019-2022 or somewhere close to those years? In Denmark we had a year to make government/public apps fully accessible and the same for websites and documents presented on websites. We also had to create accessibility certificates and dedicated pages on the websites to prove and clarify the state of the accessibility (or lack of, together with a statement of what's being done to remedy the issues). Are these "new" EU laws for a different sector (private?) or something else? I can't find any references in the article. I may be blind (pun intended).

Mashimo 1y ago
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.

mrtksn 1y ago

I'm sure this will freak out many indie developers, but relax this doesn't affect you. Just yesterday I stumbled upon a developer video from Germany who was trying to build some AI RAG SaaS for small businesses and was completely overwhelmed with the EU Privacy and data protection regulations and was stuttering when was talking about going to jail for using OpenAI API the wrong way. Just Wow. These things are not for you, nobody is going to jail for their app or paying life ruining fines in Europe as long as they don't actually cause real harm. All those rules and regulations are intended for large companies who abuse their power or harm large parts of the society by ignoring stuff when not making them profit.

jonathanstrange 1y ago
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.
- mrtksn 1y ago
  Any examples of indie devs burned by that danger? Don't do shady stuff and you will be fine and if you do shady stuff and push for edge cases and interpretation ambiguities to run your business then study the laws in details and lawyer up. The basics are simple enough to run a legit business. There are some obvious and basic data protection requirements but I wouldn't call a gray zone unless pushing for it. Also, there's no EU police checking apps for violations etc. You don't just get sued the moment your app hits the App Store.
- ahofmann 1y ago
  There is no legal grey zone. Just read the law. In Germany it's the BFSG (Barrierefreiheitsstärkungsgesetz) and it is much more pleasant than this monster of a word let's you assume. It mainly boils down to: write ARIA tags and adhere to WCAG version 2.1 level AA.

ilioscio 1y ago

Punishing groups for failing to implement accessability seems drastic, isn't there some to spurn them to action with incentivization instead? You catch more flies with honey..

baq 1y ago
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.
Mashimo 1y ago
If a shopping mall refused to build a wheelchair ramp, would you be fine with them not receiving any kind of penalty?
- ilioscio 1y ago
  I think it's better to make these decisions in measured ways, rather than broad sweeping generalities, a shopping mall should have multiple motivations to build a wheelchair ramp before 'penalties' are used. I'm not inherently against enforcing accessibility, but it sucks to go for punishments as a first course of action.
phillipseamore 1y ago
The honey is that being accessible could increase your possible market up to 10%.
- ilioscio 1y ago
  If that's true then the punishments aren't really needed?

lobito25 1y ago

Do adult websites also need to implement this? For example, captions on adult videos?

adwawdawd 1y ago

[flagged]

ahofmann 1y ago
This is also FUD. Please stop it. The law is for disabled people who need to use important tools online. It is not about some guy who tries to sell his music.
- adwawdawd 1y ago
  Thanks for the clarifications, I hope you are right and this won't be abused. I recall a website pushing pictures into the "license free" section of google images and then suing other websites reusing them for copyright infringement.
cdmckay 1y ago
None of the penalties are jail time and microenterprises (<10 employees) are exempt. There’s also a disproportionate burden clause that would also probably exempt you.
- adwawdawd 1y ago
  Thanks for clarifying!
Mashimo 1y ago
Are you making more than 2 million EUR in profit? And I also don't see anything related to music, the closes I can see is "audio-visual media services such as television broadcast" What are you on about? This is target against big cooperation, so a blind person can buy a bus ticket online.
- adwawdawd 1y ago
  I wrote the website my music is hosted on (an audio visual media service) using Godot. How am I supposed to make that accessible? But I didn't know about the limits, which would make it okay in my case.

lobito25 1y ago

Do adult websites also need to implement this? For example, captions on videos?

Mashimo 1y ago
Mhhh, maybe? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44394684 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44394684 > - access to audio-visual media services such as television broadcast and related consumer equipment But only if your adult website makes more than 2 million EUR in profit.
dominicrose 1y ago
I'm guessing it's a joke because good luck trying to regulate these websites, even the bigger ones. France, and maybe other countries is trying to but fails to protect minors from these websites.

pabe 1y ago

These rules don't apply to businesses that make less than 2.000.000€ a year and have less than 10 employees and don't create physical products.

zerof1l 1y ago

There's a German version that has nice FAQ and is written in a more human friendly way going into all the details. You can use Google translate https://bfsg-gesetz.de/#faq https://bfsg-gesetz.de/#faq I'm very interested in how they've implemented Google Analytics. No external JS is loaded, just 9KB of packed JS embedded implementing a minimal call... and then it is being sent to their own script analytics4.php which acts like MITM. Does anyone know the name of the plugin or package they are using?

rickydroll 1y ago

I read the article and I feel unseen, invisible. It is yet another accessibility initiative that assumes users fit into the 'blind' or 'not blind' categories. There's never a mention of people needing speech recognition or any other physical mobility aid. Keyboard shortcuts are not enough. I should be able to navigate a webpage completely by speech. The actual speech UI would take some thinking. You want both absolute by name and relative references, as in "follow that link," "third link back," "follow threads", and " follow new," as a bare minimum.

Avamander 1y ago
Sorry, but isn't that something also provided by screen narrators (that are usually meant for visual impairments)?

butz 1y ago

First good way to improve accessibility is to remove cookie banners, especially those that pop out after a while after website loads.

zihotki 1y ago

I'm european and I wonder how that would be enforced especially for non-EU e-commerce. I also wonder if these aria tags would help writing adblock expressions