Accessibility in 2024

Hi, everyone. My name is Chandra Carney. I use the pronouns she, her, and I'm here at React Summit to talk about accessibility in 2024. You can find me on various social medias with my name here, Chandra Carney, as well as my website, the same thing. But quickly, some information about me before we dive in.

I live in New York. I'm an accessibility professional. I've built three accessibility programs at three big companies. I've been doing this almost ten years. I also consult with companies, so feel free to get in touch if you need anything. I also used to be a software engineer, so hello to all of you. I've recovered from two major surgeries in this last year and I've been making a lot of ceramics as part of my healing journey. I also really love dogs so much that sometimes I cry.

So, I want to say, as we're getting started, at the very beginning here, this won't be a talk on implementation, because I have some important accessibility updates to share, where we're at in 2024 and what's new in the landscape. We'll quickly define accessibility, then move on to some updates to standards and specifications. And then updates to laws and regulations. Then I'll talk a little bit about how to tackle it all. Before we talk about what's coming and what's new in 2024, we can take a moment to define how we talk about accessibility, so that everyone's on the same page. So, first and foremost, I want to define what and who we're talking about when we say the word accessibility. Accessibility is something we talk about when accounting for people with disabilities. We have a lot of misconceptions that accessibility is scalability or reliability or something maybe that's just easy to access. But in this context, it's about disabled people. And here, the phrase people with disabilities is considered person-first language. It's also acceptable to say disabled people, which is identity-first language. And I really find that I use them interchangeably. Identity-first language or people-first language might be what someone prefers, or it may not. It's just a personal preference. Back to defining all things accessibility here, there are many ways to define it, many ways to think about it. So, I want to introduce mine. Accessibility is equal access for people with disabilities.

It's independence for people with disabilities. It's privacy. It's inclusion. And above all, accessibility is a civil right. So, just think, if you're disabled and you're trying to fill out an inaccessible medical questionnaire, you might have to ask someone for help, like a stranger or a friend. And that could be very, very personal information that maybe only your doctor should know. So, that's taking away certain people's independence or privacy and their right to equal access.

When we're building software, we are making choices. All of these ways of thinking about accessibility is now actually recognized by the UN through something called the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. It aims to shift away from viewing disabled people as objects of charity or as objects of medical treatment and moves towards viewing them as full and equal members of society. This may sound kind of basic, but if I'm disabled and I can't use products and services, how can I be a full and equal member?

So, another thing that I just want to run through is the kinds of disability. You've probably seen variations on these types of categorizations. There are lots of varied disabilities, and someone may have more than one disability. We have auditory disabilities, cognitive, learning, and neurological, motor disabilities, speech, and vision disabilities. It's important to remember here that accessibility and disability is more than just screen reader users and blind people. Disabilities can also be more than permanent. They might be temporary, like after a surgery or illness, you might need to use crutches or wear an eye patch, or they can be situational, like being in a loud or really quiet environment but still wanting to watch a video. The diagram you see on the right here is called the persona spectrum, and it's from Microsoft's inclusive design principles. It can be used to understand related types across a spectrum of permanent, temporary, and situational scenarios. It shows how a solution scales to a broader audience. And scaling to a broader audience can be kind of summarized. When you solve for one, you expand to many.

Okay, so, after this section on defining accessibility, we now know what I'm talking about when I use the word accessibility. All right. So, our next section looks at standards and specifications. And, again, this is specific to digital accessibility.

Within digital accessibility, I want to first talk to you about a global standard, WCAG, and then about a European standard called EN 301549. But first, WCAG. WCAG is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. I say WCAG, but you'll hear this lots of different ways, like WCAG or WCAG or WCAG. WCAG is the most discussed standard, and is created by the World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C. They develop standards and guidelines based on the principles of accessibility, internationalization, privacy, privacy, and security. The accessibility guidelines here, WCAG, are serving as actually a basis of global legal regulations at this point. That means WCAG standards are actually written into the law.

And despite its name, WCAG covers web and mobile, and is comprised of versions and levels. First, we'll jump into the levels. We have AA and AAA. AA serves us basics, AA serves us what all apps should have, and AAA serves us what is good to have for a wide variety of users. AA also serves as legal and regulatory standards. So, you'll actually see AA written into laws. Next, we have the versions of WCAG. We've got 2.0, which I have on here because some companies still use it, even though it's 16 years old. Most of us had flip phones back then. So, we can really talk about different interfaces here. And the entire modern JavaScript ecosystem has been invented since then, with Node first coming out in 2009. And it's been around for a while. But anyway, WCAG 2.1 was released in 2018. Most companies strive for this as their standard. But again, it's 6 years old. Last year, 2.2 came out in October. In most countries, the version of WCAG referenced in their laws and regulations is 2.1. But I have an asterisk here because regulations can and will be updated.

2.1, again, is 6 years old. And we all know the progress in digital technology and smartphones that has been made in the last 6 years. So, you should not wait to start implementation of 2.2. You should use it as your baseline and not get caught off guard by legal updates.

So, putting this together as a package, your goals should be to meet WCAG 2.2 AA at a minimum. Though I do recognize if you or your company is playing a lot of catch-up, your goals may be to get to 2.1 first and then quickly adopt 2.2.

Now, let's take a look at the European standard, known, again, as EN 301549. We'll call this the European standard. If your company conducts business in Europe, this European accessibility standard is probably for you. It's a technical standard, which is then transposed into law. Its current version is 3.2.1. And if you take a look at the individual requirements of this version, you'll find that the European accessibility standard actually includes WCAG as part of its standard, as sort of its baseline. And here, again, I should note WCAG 2.1 requirements is the European standard's current reference, but it's expected to be using WCAG 2.2 requirements soon. And then here, on top of WCAG, the European standard also adds a few additional requirements for cognitive disabilities and some other things.

Now we know a little bit about disability and a little bit about the standards created, but why would companies want to use those standards? Don't they just care about profit and shareholder happiness? Well, sometimes. So, in comes the law. As we jump into laws and regulations, I want to preface, I'm not a lawyer, so you should consult with your company's lawyers if you need specific legal advice. I'm going to talk about two big things. Within digital accessibility, I want to first talk to you about an update in the US law and then an update in the EU law.

In the US, we have two main digital accessibility laws people talk about. These two laws are at the federal or national level. These are the Americans with Disabilities Act, or ADA, and Section 508. The ADA received an update in 2024, so let's talk about that. If you're interested in other laws in the US, there are a lot. You can follow Laini Feingold's talks or websites for the most recent legal updates or more localized laws.

These two laws are at the federal or national level. These are the Americans with Disabilities Act, or ADA, and Section 508. The ADA received an update in 2024, so let's talk about that. If you're interested in other laws in the US, there are a lot. You can follow Laini Feingold's talks or websites for the most recent legal updates or more localized laws.

The Americans with Disabilities Act was passed in 1990, and it does a lot of things, but to simplify it, it protects the rights of people with disabilities at the national level. A lot of visible action very quickly happened, like ramps were added to buildings, and braille was added to elevators, and so on. The following year, it started applying to state and local government as well and in public places, or we call this places of public accommodation. Since all of this was implemented before personal computers and smartphones were in our everyday lives, there's been theory and testing of the legal waters that the ADA should apply to technology, but it's been disputed by state and local governments and by public businesses, although quite often they do lose these cases.

At the beginning of this section, I said I would talk to you about two big updates. This one is the first, the ADA updates. After many years of waiting and advocating for an update, we finally got a ruling on this big theoretical question. Two months ago in April 2024, the ruling states that websites and mobile apps must be accessible. The current standard is in the law that we should meet WCAG 2.1 AA. And technically, this update came under the state and local level and applies to contractors as well. But on a whole, now you, if you receive money from national, state, or local government, you need to follow WCAG 2.1 AA. No more waiting around to get sued. Governments and contractors have to make it a priority.

Now I want to talk about the second big update, which comes under EU law. Under the European Union, we again have two primary digital accessibility laws. One is the Web Accessibility Directive in place since 2021. In a simplified way, you can think about it as covering the public sector. And next we have the European Accessibility Act. I will focus here because it's somewhat known as the private sector law. Although, that's a bit of a misconception as it's very broad. And folks, time is running out. This is the second of the big things that I mentioned I would talk about, the European Accessibility Act, or EAA. All right. So, in 2019, the EU put the EAA into effect. So, you might be wondering, what's the fuss about this year? The 2019 passage by EU outlined more dates, including two you should know about.

The first, in 2022, each member state, meaning each country in the EU, needed to have incorporated EAA into their own laws and needed to have defined their own enforcement mechanisms. And those enforcement mechanisms have included being blocked outright from selling to customers or facing large fines or facing legal action from customers. And then some member states got a little creative, like Ireland here, by including imprisonment for business leaders.

Incorporation into laws has now happened. The next deadline is June 28, 2025. And that's when member states start enforcement for businesses. That means businesses have just one year to pull it off. So, if you haven't already started already, get started on accessibility.

The EAA applies to if you do business in the EU. It covers many, though not all private sector industries. It looks at the whole picture and is very thorough. It covers products and services, along with hardware and software, and it covers integrations businesses already may be using, third-party integrations. Disability advocates are excited about it because there are so many ways in which a disabled user might become blocked in today's landscape.

Let's take a bank, for example. If you work at a bank, you must make sure your website and apps are accessible. You must also ensure that your third-party chatbot is accessible and any other of the many integrations you may use. Your hardware, like your ATMs, must also be accessible. And along with, of course, any other hardware your customers need to use. All this is really seeming pretty serious. And the EU is holding manufacturers accountable. And what the EU is saying here is this is really serious. It's no longer acceptable to exclude people with disabilities. If you have a big market in France or Germany, under EAA, if they block you from doing business, you may wake up to find that you've been closed out of that market seemingly overnight. And what we're seeing in reality is that you really have been closed out of the big market by excluding people with disabilities. And the EU is really reinforcing that.

Now there are some big updates coming. We know about the specs and about some legal updates.

So, okay, that was a lot. Now there are some big updates coming. We know about the specs and about some legal updates. What do we do? Accessibility is a huge topic, and there's a lot of deep dives you can go into, tons of resources and testing tools, whole talks on implementation and training and design considerations.

So, I'll share a little bit, just a slice, about how those of us in the accessibility field approach it and how you can advocate to implement it in your companies. I'll leave the technical implementation up to you, but I'm going to focus for today's presentation on the software development life cycle and here's what I mean by that. We plan by gathering requirements, we design and develop, if we're lucky, we QA and launch. And in 2024, most companies use the Agile model, of course.

When we're talking about accessibility, though, there's also an audit. An audit shows where we may be lagging in accessibility. Often this is yearly, although sometimes it's more. And an accessibility audit is usually where companies concentrate all of their accessibility efforts and spending. Don't focus everything on this audit. This is reactive. If you're doing an audit and then fixing it only every year, that is very reactive. So, we're really shipping every day.

In 2024, teams are still missing accessibility issues in all their earlier stages of development. So, if any team at any point can introduce accessibility issues, what do we do? We start to, and we're seeing this across a lot of companies, implement processes to catch accessibility issues early and often. This is following many other models that we have seen in the software industry. But accessibility, for some reason, has been pretty far behind. In my work, I do this. I think about accessibility strategy at companies, about the whole picture. In planning, are we considering using alternative use cases? Are we building our personas with disabilities? Are we reviewing with subject matter experts at any stage of the process? In research, are we including disabled participants? In design, are we using accessibility plugins and annotations? In engineering, are we using lenders, automated checks to check for accessibility? Are we using semantic code when possible? Are we using a design system? Is it accessible? And when we go to launch, are we testing with assistive technology, both in manual QA and automated QA?

You also may see more frequent audits that are good. And what we see here is that this is really proactive accessibility. And this is where we're headed in 2024. Companies need to push this way. Now that we've gone through what disability and accessibility is at its core, specs and laws, to wrap up, I really want to return to how we define accessibility at work. Accessibility is a requirement, not a feature. It is practices and principles we adopt to ensure we make things accessible. And I also think of accessibility as everyone's responsibility. Now, okay. Go advocate for change at your companies. Implement engineering processes for accessibility and start the conversations early. Thank you. And have a great rest of your conference. I'll leave you with a few great resources here in the slide deck to get started. And feel free to reach out. Bye.