Nordic Accessibility Community Group: “EN 301 549 vs WCAG” | June 4, 14:00 CET

Attendees

Erik Gustafsson Spagnoli, Robin Liendeborg, Umut Gultekin, Robin Whittleton, Pär Lannerö.

Notes

Insights from Sweden

The meeting was quite Sweden focused as participants were from Sweden.

Swedish authority PTS

They have informed publicly that they will use the screen reader JAWS for testing.

Information missing, such as how will a form to report fails work, hard to know how and where to do it.

Some good news of new information from PTS https://pts.se//nyheter-och-pressmeddelanden/nytt-stod-tillganglighetslagen/

You have to report in 14 days from discovering the error.

Do you need to report everything, if you fix it straight away? The purpose of the law is to make things accessible. The law says you still have to report it within 14 days.

Some countries say they prefer reactive reporting instead of proactive reporting. How does PTS handle this?

Benefits, reporting probably shows you work with accessibility and probably not be the first.

Two different kinds of fines in Sweden

There are two different fines you can get in Sweden.

Formal requirements fine “Sanktionsavgift” for not reporting or collaborating with the market agency. 10ksek and 10 msek for each occurance.

Vite, for accessibility issues not fixed after a grace period of being able to fix it.

Monitoring discussion

They are starting with E-commerce and starting with the worst actors. Amazon is a large actor that is not doing accessibility in the same way. Compared to quite large actors H&M or large grocery stores Amazon has millions of pages. They would have to work together across the EU. Probably IKEA is an actor that will be targeted due to many countries… Maybe the Chinese actors that have other issues apart from accessibility?

The GitHub repo with monitoring agencies for the EAA is updated: https://github.com/Nordic-Accessibility-Community-Group/working-with-EN-301-549/blob/main/monitoring-agencies-information.md

Article 32

Service depending on a product, can be used for five years.

Even if the company claims 5 years grace it old unaltered contracts. New customers are new contracts and they have to provide an accessible service. So it makes little sense to use that clause.

Good read about article 32: https://www.craigabbott.co.uk/blog/european-accessibility-act-article-32-and-why-it-sucks

Meetings

Plan meetings for after summer, Erik will send out invites upcoming month.