- Good morning and good afternoon everyone. My name's Anthony Priore. I'm the digital marketing manager at TPGi. We're just gonna wait one minute as people sign in and we'll get started briefly. We'll see a few people trickling in, so we're just gonna give it one more minute and we'll get started momentarily. Yes, the presentation will be recorded and the slide decks will be sent out as well. Okay, I think we can get started. So thank you everyone for joining us today for our webinar, six months to the European Accessibility Act deadline, what do you need to do? With TPGi's David Sloan, chief accessibility officer and user experience practice manager, TPGi's Mark Miller, director of sales, and Deirdre Kilroy, partner at Bird & Bird. So before we get started, I do have a few housekeeping items I'd like to get to. And firstly, this session is being recorded, as I mentioned, and we'll email everyone the recording after the event. Secondly, we have captions available, so please feel free to use those as needed. Next, we will have time for a live Q&A at the end of the webinar. So please use the Q&A box and we'll answer as many of the questions as we can at the end of the presentation. Just as a reminder, sometimes the questions can get lost in chat so please try to your best to send them to the Q&A box and we'll make sure that those can get answered, but we will monitor both boxes. And then lastly, if anyone needs any accessibility support training or usability testing, we will send out an email with a link to schedule a time with one of our experts. So with that, I'll pass it off to the team to provide introduction for themselves and take it away.

- Hi everyone, my name is Deirdre Kilroy and I'm a partner in Bird & Bird. Bird & Bird is an international law firm. And I'm based in Ireland where I practice in the area of technology and data regulation. So it's apt I'm here today to talk to you about the European Accessibility Act Directive 2019/882. So where does this law come from? Can we just move to the next slide. So in the European Union, 27 member states, we have the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. And it's apt that we're talking to you today on the International Day of Persons with Disabilities, which is a UN mandated day. So Article 9 of this convention is very purpose of in its approach. It states that the signatories to this convention must enable individuals with disabilities to live independently and participate fully in all aspects of life in the geo block in the European Union. And consequently, member states in the European Union have to take appropriate measures. So if we have this convention, why do we have the European Accessibility Act? So if we just move on. We have the purpose, again, restated in the Accessibility Act. And this is a piece of legislation which is intended to harmonize the approach taken to certain goods and products and to make the accessibility requirements for these products and services known. So we have the convention, which sets out a principle at a very high level. The European Accessibility Act drops it down a level and specifies for those who are in its scope what their requirements are in terms of accessibility and how do they have to respect these principles applicable in the member states. So let's look at that in a little bit more detail. Moving on. What did the European Union do when they decided to take this approach and bring in these set of benchmark rules? Well, they enacted the European Accessibility Act? And the status of the Accessibility Act is actually, it is not a piece of law that has direct effect immediately at member state level. It's a minimum set of rules. So when it was proposed by the commission and then agreed in the trial log, member states were then told, you must take the rules within the European Accessibility Act and promulgate them and bring them into law across the member states. However, member states have some flexibility in relation to how they bring those rules in. So in fact, we're not actually talking about one law, we're talking about a set of 27 laws for each member state where the European Union member state brings in the law and determines how it should be reflected in its own national laws. Not only that, the member states have some flexibility to add to the legislation. So the primary legislation at European level specifies certain goods and services that are in scope, but it is open to member states to add to that list and to give more specificity in relation to the rules. So this means that while it is harmonized in terms of the approach that you take in Europe, you still have to look at a national level to get the actual hard rules. In terms of supervision and enforcement, that's also reflected in the structure whereby the European Commission makes sure all member states bring in these laws. And then at member state level, the member state decides how the rules are enforced and supervised and enacted, bearing in mind the requirements of the legislation itself. So let's look at the European Accessibility Act in a little bit more detail. What does it apply to? Well, it doesn't apply to all goods and services in Europe. There's a very specified list. So a lot of the exercise we do with our clients is trying to determine whether their products fall into the categories that are set out in these lists. So here we have the list of products that's in scope. We talk about general purpose computer hardware systems and operating systems for consumers, self service terminals aimed at consumers which may be payment terminals, automated teller machines in terms of banking, ticketing machines, check-in, terminal equipment aimed at electronic communication services, and also audiovisual media services and e-readers. So not every digital product is in scope. And one of the significant exercises you have when you're looking at this piece of legislation is deciding whether your product can map onto these product descriptions. Similarly, if we move to the services slide, we'll see that there are also a set of services descriptions. Again, similar exercise. Do you provide electronic communication services? Do you give access to audiovisual media services? Is air, bus, rail, waterborne transport service something that's in your product suite? If so, what elements then do you need to think about from an accessibility point of view? Do you deliver consumer banking services, ebooks? And I've just spotlighted the last piece there because it is by far the most commonly triggered category, which is the e-commerce service. So even if your product and service that you sell on your website at a distance to the European community or consumers, even if that is not part of an in scope product or service, the fact that you allow for e-commerce transactions via your website will mean that that aspect, the transaction aspect of the website will be in scope. So it's not actually about what you're selling on the website, it's the fact that you facilitate e-commerce transactions. As you might imagine, this is an accessibility piece of legislation and it's mapping onto all these different sectors. The categorization of these sectors is often informed by other pieces of European legislation. So for example, consumer banking is a specified category. And when you look at the granular definitions in the Act, it tracks back to technical documents describing what those are. So this exercise can be quite involved. And because this is a relatively new piece of legislation, making sure that you have identified your products and services is critical. Moving on then. If you determine in your business there is a product and service and scope, what obligations do you owe? Well, the European Accessibility Act categorizes different economic operators in different ways. So it's important to identify your role in the legislative framework, be it manufacturer, manufacturer representative in Europe where the manufacturer's outside offshore, which might be the case in the US for example if you're selling into the European Union, importer or distributor. And these are technical operator descriptors, and so they need to be mapped on to your particular supply chain and your model of doing business in the consumer context in the European Union. For services, it's a little more straightforward in that if you are a service provider, you are in scope. But this can have an effect on the service provider supply chain also, where you may have more than one service provider delivering to a consumer in a particular digital product or an in scope service. So this law is aimed at bringing up the benchmark in the European Union to protect consumers there. So it has extraterritorial effect just by virtue of the fact you operate outside of the European Union but do business in the European Union won't remove you from the impact of this legislation, you would still have to take account of it. And the goods and services that you push into the geo block will have to be compliant. And when we're looking at what this piece of legislation seeks to do, and I'm so excited to hear Mark and David later on take us through it in more technical detail, what it's aiming to do is to enhance the experience for consumers with disabilities. And that's a really broad definition, this definition of consumers with disabilities because the consumer definition maps onto consumer law definitions generally in Europe, which is a very broad categorization. Anyone who is transacting outside of their traded profession, essentially. But the disabilities category is also very broad. So we're looking at physical, mental, intellectual, or sensory impairments. Really broad there, there's no de minimis. I wear glasses, so therefore in scope because I have an impairment. So it is a very broad categorization. So we've looked at products and services and we've determined our categorization. What do we do then if we've determined something is in scope? Well, if we move to the next slide. We look and see, is there any exemption we can look at? Or is there a provision that maybe we can rely upon in terms of looking at the landscape that applies? So there is an acknowledgement that there's some heavy lifting to be done in terms of the UX. You have to close the gap between compliance and the current state of play. Micro-enterprises, so quite small companies are opted out. So they may well still be in scope, they may need to categorize themselves to check to see if they are in scope in terms of the application, the products, the services, but they may be entitled to rely on an exemption. Now, exemption in European Union law are very narrowly construed. You have to take care when applying them, and you have to be able to defend and justify them. So for example, if you thought you were a micro-enterprise, you'd have to be vigilant to make sure that once you stopped being a micro-enterprise, you became aware again that you were in play in terms of compliance. There's a very intriguing exemption also that if the adoption to render the product or service compliant would result in a fundamental alteration to the basic nature of the product or service, there may be an exemption. Now, that's intriguing and it needs to be really carefully interrogated to see if that can be relied on in a particular context. So too must the exemption that there can be an opt out, if you like, where there is a disproportionate burden placed on the business. I mentioned the fact that member states can choose to add to the categories of products and services or perhaps even add to the obligations placed on those who are in scope of this particular legislation. There's also some non-mandatory options within the Act which can also be activated by the member states should they choose. So this exercise that we typically do for our clients is we look at the European Accessibility Act and we determine whether they're in scope at a European Act level. But once they find out they are in scope, then they will need to consider the individual requirements in the member states in which they place their goods or services. So often, this is a mapping exercise where you then look and see, what are the obligations? Now, the Act itself does serve specific obligations which must be complied with, but these are then imported into national law in the European Union and activated and expressed in their own way. So as you might expect, many more obligations for manufacturers of products than perhaps other players or economic operators in the supply chain. So we'll be hearing about some of those obligations and how they manifest themselves in really good operational and practical terms later on. But manufacturers have primary obligations in terms of the design of the product, preparing appropriate technical information, ensuring that the products are identified in scope, adapting instructions, support around the product, safety information and what have you. If you are importing a product into the European Union, you have certain obligations to ensure that the product that comes through over the border into the European Union is appropriate for use within the European Union in this context. So importers similarly have obligations in relation to it. And manufacturers, importers and distributors generally have to have responsibility in terms of being vigilant as to the products that they bring into the European Union. Service providers too must design their services in accordance with the obligations that member state level that are expressed in respect with their particular services and the member state in question, they have certain transparency and information giving obligations. And there are also procedures generally in relation to ensuring that the conformity obligations are maintained because of course, this is not a once-off exercise, although perhaps a lot of the effort will be done in the initial compliance exercise, products change over time, so too do services, so too do the relationships and ecosystems around the supply chain. So you have to have a vigilance and constantly monitor and ensure that your product is maintained in a compliant fashion even when it's getting updated or adjusted over time. So we'll move to the next slide please. What do the accessibility requirements, how do they manifest themselves? We saw on this other... On the earlier slide there that there are primary obligations, particularly at the service provider level and the manufacturer level. Well, in very simple terms, products have to be designed to ensure that their use is designed with people with disabilities in mind. And they must ensure that the products have specific information. That their instructions, and user interface and functionality design, support services, and packaging is designed in such a way to take account of the particular product use, the particular service function, and ensure that that's appropriate. And the same types of obligations apply in the service context. So you must provide information to the individuals about the service, features and facilities. And the way that you access the digital service needs to be rendered accessible. Support services need to be updated. And practices, policies and procedures adjusted. And we'll be hearing about that in more detail, which I'm really looking forward to later on in this session. What it doesn't do, and I think it's important to say what it doesn't do at this point, it's not incredibly prescriptive. So it doesn't dictate in a very prescriptive way exactly how the objectives of the legislation are achieved, which is helpful because that obviously would be quickly overtaken with innovation and developments in a particular sector or product space. And products need to evolve in their own way appropriate to their use function and the other laws that regulate them. But it does set certain benchmarks that needs to be baked into the product design process. So I'm not going to dwell too much in that because my fantastic colleagues later on are going to deal with this in a little bit more detail. So just what happens next? So we moved to the next slide, please. So we are in this process at the moment where the European Accessibility Act came into force in 2019. Every member state was to have its member state law in place by 2022. And next year it applies in all member states. So there are some timelines that apply depending on the type of products you have and the type or service that you have, and certain relationships that may already be in existence or the arrangements in relation to the particular ecosystem that you have. So the timeline for transition generally is next June, but there are some adjustments for certain types of categories. I would say the reason it started in 2019, and only sort of starts hitting us in terms of enforcement in 2025, is that the legislators recognize the need to give some time for people to adjust their products, adjust their services, in a good time to take account of the deadline. And that can take some time, as we all know from a product design and service design point of view. Having said that, as a data regulatory lawyer in Europe, I'm very aware of this tsunami of laws coming through with the moment in all sorts of areas impacting digital services and technology. And this piece of legislation seems to have fallen through the cracks with quite a number of companies, some of whom you would not expect to be coming to this lately. So if this is kind of a news to you, you're not alone, but it is important, I suppose, to recognize that there may be a requirement under this legislation and now is the time to act, address your understanding, close your compliance loop in terms of understanding what you need to do and recognize the consequences of the legislation for your particular business. So if you move to the next slide. And this is what clients always ask me after having gone through that piece. You know, how vigilant will this be enforced? What will the landscape look like from a sanctions point of view? So there are designated national authorities in each member state that are responsible for monitoring compliance with this piece of legislation. They have quite wide powers, which will each be introduced in their national law to carry out compliance checks, carry out market surveillance. They can address non-compliance and they can direct corrective actions. Now, it'll vary from member state to member state. Some member states have chosen to split up enforcement and sanctions across a larger number of regulators and others. Some have taken a very local approach to this idea of what a corrective action would look like in their legislative framework. But there is this principle that all of these structures are in place in every member state. So it does require, in some cases, an understanding to be gained about this monitoring and enforcement landscape. Moving to the next slide. So in addition to having this vigilance supervision, there's also an ability to sanction for failure. That, again, is dictated at member state level, but every member state has to ensure that corrective actions can be taken and that there's effective dissuasive means for ensuring compliance, which means sanctions. And it will vary from country to country, the level of fines, the potential powers of the regulator, but the penalties have to be effective, proportionate and dissuasive. So again, there's going to be a landscape there where there will be sanctions and a disincentive from being in terms of the scope of the legislation, noncompliant. What will be in each jurisdiction will remain to be seen once the Act starts to be enforced. So I'm now going to move to my colleague Anthony, who's going to introduce our next speaker. You'll be shouting in alarm, why didn't she tell us how to become compliant? What should we be doing next? But rest assured, my colleagues will be dealing with that next so I'll pass the baton on and I'll take questions, please pop them in the chat if you'd like to ask us any questions as we go along and we'll address them at the end.

- Yeah, so TPGi's Mark Miller and David Sloan will be taking over from here. So they can provide introductions for themselves, and we can get started with their portion of the presentation.

- Thank you, Anthony. David, if you can put up the slides.

- Yep. Do you see the slides?

- No, the sharing stopped.

- Ah, okay. Let me try again. There we go.

- Perfect. Okay, well, so we're gonna start. I'm Mark Miller, I'm the director of sales here at TPGi. I've been in accessibility for over a decade. I work with the W3C's working group for accessibility maturity model, so creating a model for building and baking, as Deirdre said, accessibility into your organization. So David, do you wanna introduce yourself as well and we'll kind of take the next few slides together?

- Sure, yeah. So I'm David Sloan. I've been with TPGi for 11 and a half years now. I'm currently practice manager for our user experience practice and our solutions delivery unit. And I'm also chief accessibility officer for Vispero, the Vispero organization. My interest in the European Accessibility Act is somebody who still has purple or red of whatever color sport from the European Union, even though the UK where I was born is no longer a member of the European Union. And I no longer live in the UK, I live in the US now, but I'm still very interested in the application of the EAA. And I think it's a great opportunity for accessibility. So yeah, this part of the presentation, Mark and I will share two sort of parallel approaches to how organizations can plan to meet the European Accessibility Act. And Mark, you're gonna talk first about part A of the plan, addressing existing digital services and products or devices.

- Yeah, absolutely. And then David, you can go over building capacity, which as Deirdre mentioned it, that it's not just enough to take a product that exists today and make it accessible, but you need to bake into your organization accessibility so that you can maintain that over time. So that is called build capacity to manage accessibility. And David and I'll probably handle both of these together, but primarily I'll speak on A and David will speak on B. So typically the situation that most organizations are in or that they already have... Is that they already have products that would fall under the requirements of the EAA in existence, right? So you're likely looking at those products and saying, how do we bring them into conformance? How do we meet the requirements of the EAA with those products initially, right? So the first steps you need to take to really think about that is initially figuring out which products, devices that you have that are covered by the EAA. For many organizations what that means is that you're gonna focus on your existing websites, applications that could be mobile applications that are providing e-commerce or customer banking services to consumers in the EU. And also services delivered through kiosk or self-service terminals. Or the way I like to think of it or say it so you don't get too locked in to one thing here is anything that's in an enclosed system, which means that there's hardware and software that are dedicated and working together to provide a service. And typically we see this when we're out in the world versus a website where we might see that from our home or our office when we're on the internet. And then order each... So once you have that kind of figured out, what you want to do is you want to... You may not be able to tackle everything at once, right? So you wanna order that by priority based on certain appropriate risk factors. Next slide, David.

- Yeah. No, I was just gonna expand on the risk factors-

- Oh, go for it.

- Yeah. So obviously we've heard from Deirdre that there are different deadlines. So one very practical risk factor is how long have you got to make your service or product or device conformant? And if it's one that has an extension, it's a self-service terminal, for example, maybe that's less of a priority compared to a website providing an e-commerce service, which has to be ready by the June, 28th, 2025 deadline. So the EAA deadline is a clear example of a risk factor you might consider, but you might also consider things like the function, the volume of use, how many people use the service or the product. The connection to business, is it a core part of your business or is it something that's more or less frequently used? Things like, do you already have a sense that there might be accessibility issues or are you fairly well... You have a fairly good understanding of how accessible the thing is at the present. Expected lifetime. Maybe you might deprioritize something that you know you're gonna replace in a year or two, whereas something else that you have invested in and are in it for the long term, you might want to make that a higher priority to evaluate first because you don't want to be replacing it, you want to be fixing it.

- Perfect. Yeah, and the other thing I think just to mention too is you really want to consider the influence that third party tools might have on your products of services. So you may be creating certain aspects of it, but there may be... You know, the example I always give is you have a website and maybe you have a help chat feature on that website. You likely didn't build that help chat feature, you likely purchased that from somebody else, but if that's not accessible it could create issues as well. So it's another thing to look at and consider. So let's look at A2, which is evaluating existing services and products and devices. So once you have that prioritized list, right? And you've considered all the risk factors that David just went over, the next step is to figure out where the gaps are. Where do those products and services not meet the requirements of the EAA? And there's a couple of different guidelines that we have that we can look at to consider how that might... Where those gaps might exist. The first one is the WCAG 2.1 Level A, which is a minimum. And then the WCAG guidelines themselves are actually at 2.2 Level A. Our recommendation typically when we're working with our clients is to look at the 2.2 at the Level A because it's future proofing and because the WCAG guidelines build on top of each other. So 2.2 considers everything that 2.1 does with additional things were added in 2.2. So that's where we would... That's where we would direct. And when you're putting in all the effort, it really makes sense to probably look into that and future proof. And there is some chatter that maybe the EAA will be adopting relatively quickly the 2.2 guidelines. So it makes total sense. The other thing to look at is the EN 301 549 requirements for software, websites and documents. And there's a close relationship between WCAG and the EN 301 549. And then there's additional relevant EAA requirements like we talked about. They cover things like kiosk, customer banking services that you may want to consider when evaluating your products to see if they have gaps. So the approach to do this. We know what we're looking against initially, right? And that's these guidelines. So we're looking at this point at technical conformance to those guidelines to find gaps. So the way that you typically do that is you start with a technical audit against the standards. So that means you potentially could do it in-house, but most people don't have that level of expertise in-house. So you may work with a third party, but you wanna work with people who are experts in these different guidelines and requirements and understand how to interact with a website in a way that they will uncover those variances. And you want to consider the key user flows, right? So just blanketly covering the whole website may not be a great way to start that, but looking at where your key user flows are, what are the key pathways that consumers take when they come to your website? And looking at how those flows meet the standards. And then reviewing of auxiliary content. So this would be documentation around what we just discussed. It might be packaging, it might be instruction, so other areas, other things that people might rely on or need to interact with in order to hit those key user flows and such.

- And Mark, just to jump in and kind of connect what you've just described with what Deirdre said earlier. Well, EAA doesn't specify detailed technical requirements in terms of reference to standards. There is an article that relates to presumption of conformance. If you can demonstrate that you conform to a harmonized European standard, then you can show that you have met the technical requirements. And EN 301 549 is a European harmonized standard. So by sort of connecting the dots, you can say that if your product or service meets relevant EN 301 549 requirements, then you can show that you're meeting EAA's requirements. EN 301 549, as you said, references WCAG 2.1 currently. EN 301 549 is undergoing revision. And when it's published, we expect that to happen maybe end of next year, early 2026, we can assume quite confidently that the updated EN 301 549 standard will reference WCAG 2.2 Level AA. So that's why we're a little more confident at listing these technical standards, even though EAA doesn't directly mention them.

- Thank you. Good points, David. All right, so A3, remediate existing services; plan for improvement... Improving or improvement of accessibility products and devices. So what we've talked about to this point is looked at those standards and found the gaps that we have. So now we understand the gaps, we've prioritized the products. The question is where do you go from here? Because you still at this point don't have an accessible product. So this is where it's important to strategically look at the results and other priorities to begin a remediation strategy. So taking where you understand the gaps are and addressing that, fixing that, making those areas accessible to people with disabilities and conformant to those guidelines. So one of the things to really consider is the impact of issues on users with disabilities. So not every issue is created equally, some of them have a much greater impact. We call some of them showstoppers, for example. You can think of that as a big oak tree that has fallen across the road. You're not going to get past that oak tree. It's likely that it's gonna be extremely difficult to drive around it. You're stopped in your tracks until somebody comes along and removes all or some of that oak tree, right? Whereas some issues may be more like large potholes that you certainly don't want there and you don't want people running into them. And maybe some... Maybe they're the kind of barriers that some people can get past and other people or other folks may not be able to get past. And then some of them may be inconveniences, right? So it really is important to look at that list of issues that has been uncovered, and decide where your remediation should start based on what's gonna have the biggest impact to people with disabilities. And then as David mentioned earlier, one of the other things to consider is the life cycle of the resource. If you've evaluated a product and you're looking at something that's gonna take you, and I'm gonna make these numbers up, but say it's gonna take you a year to fix or eight months to fix, but there's a plan within 8 to 12 months of sunsetting that product and rebuilding it. And then the efforts should really go more into the new product versus the one that may be sunsetting. And sometimes admittedly, it can be difficult to really make that evaluation because do you fix a product that's gonna sunset and be still viable for six months, or do you put all your effort into that product that's gonna replace it for six months? So there's a little bit of consideration to make there, but you do wanna look at that lifecycle of the resource and make sure that you're appropriately applying your efforts.

- I think with this slide, that sort of remediation or fixing problems that you've found in your service or your product or device, it's obviously easier to remediate a website or app compared to fixing a piece of hardware that's subject to the EAA. So I'm imagining most people on this webinar are responsible for websites or apps providing covered services under EAA rather than people who are building computing functionality or hardware to provide access to audiovisual services. But we want to recognize that if you evaluate a hardware product that's covered by EAA, there will be more effort and it'll be more complex given that you'll probably have other suppliers you need to deal with. So the remediation plan obviously is very different depending on if it's a digital service or a hardware product that's covered under EAA.

- Yeah, that's a good point, David. And with relation to effort to fix-

- Yeah.

- Versus the severity of the issue. I would also say just at a level below that, like just on the website itself, something that's relatively easy to fix and has a high impact is a great place to start and it's a great place to realize your early wins, right? Because you do want your team to feel positive about what's happening here. And being able to remove some of these barriers quickly is one, it's gonna bring your product closer to compliance more rapidly. But secondly, it's gonna be a real positive impact to your team and their early success, and sort of drive them forward to fix the rest of the issues. So go ahead, David, this is your section.

- Yeah. And you know, when we were putting together this part of the presentation, we realized that it's very much a two-pronged approach. Two parallel approaches. One is to more directly attend to your covered products or services, but equally important is to build capacity to maintain conformance over time and to provide documentary evidence of your efforts to maintain conformance over time. And in order to do that, one thing that you need to focus on is to grow organizational capacity to manage accessibility. Firstly, to ensure that somebody in your organization is accountable for efforts to conform to EAA. Secondly, the organization needs to establish an accessibility standard in line with EAA requirements. You can tell all of the designers, developers, product managers, whoever has an influence on your products and services, we need to be EAA compliant. What does that mean? That needs to be translated into relevant accessibility standard that can be used to drive development and design decision making. Building a program to train staff to give them the relevant knowledge and skills needed to meet accessibility requirements and ensure they understand their responsibilities is a really important part of organizational capacity. And that can start small and it should always be role focused rather than telling everybody about everything there is to know about accessibility. That can be a huge challenge. So being realistic, and giving people, helping people build skills in a confident way. Acquiring and using tools to support accessibility efforts. Making good use of things like automated accessibility scanning tools that help reduce the time and effort required to identify and locate accessibility issues that you need to fix. Defining and ensuring people are aware of and follow processes for designing, building, and maintaining covered services and products to ensure that those processes include accessibility appropriately. Again, this helps reduce the chances that you remediate a service because your processes didn't think about accessibility, that accessibility regresses over time. Process for tracking new requirements under the EAA. For example, if the updated EN 301 549 standard includes additional requirements relevant to a product or service that you're responsible for, you should have a process in place to ensure that somebody's monitoring those new requirements and can communicate those to all relevant stakeholders. And as Mark mentioned earlier, it's especially important be managing accessibility in vendor relationships. Deirdre also mentioned supply chain, given that you are likely to be dependent on third parties for some aspects of your product or your digital service, making sure that accessibility is appropriately managed in those relationships that where necessary there are contractual terms that define what the vendor needs to do in terms of providing you with accessible products and services to use in your efforts. So that's another area to tend to. Second part of building capacity is establishing communication channels, including a point of contact for accessibility, who's going to be handling incoming requests for information about accessibility of your product or service, or who might receive complaints or reports of inaccessibility. So having somebody who can handle those contacts rather than not being sure and you're passing a complaint from one person to another. That's not a great way to efficiently handle any communication relating to accessibility. Communication channels should exist to allow reporting of accessibility issues by people to you. So they may be your current customers or third parties who happen to have noted an accessibility issue on your website or app or product. Or communication channels to allow reporting of accessibility issues by you to the market surveillance authorities. You are obliged to be proactive in reporting any areas of non-conformance to market surveillance authorities and to update them with efforts to address those areas of nonconformance. And making sure that when you receive information, that there is a process for handling that accessibility feedback in terms of acting on fixing issues that may exist and reporting back to the person or people or organization that reported those issues to you that allows you to keep that communication channel open and transparent and strong. And helps build trust that you're updating somebody, especially if they're directly affected and need some additional assistance while that barrier remains in place. And thirdly, building capacity includes documenting efforts. And this is something that's required under the EAA for consumers. It's important to have processes and practices to provide accurate information about accessibility features of a service or a product. And to do so in an accessible way, it's all very well describing the accessibility of a product, but if it's provided in an accessible format, then the people who are directly... Who should directly benefit from that information can't actually access it, which is sort of something you want to avoid. And then instructions for use, making sure that instructions for use are accessible and include information about accessibility, and that where necessary, they exist, they're provided on packaging for certain products that are covered by EAA. From market surveillance authorities, they will be looking for evidence of efforts that you have made to fix known accessibility issues, known areas where your product or service is not in conformance with the legislation. So you need to have a process for providing evidence of efforts, and that might include audits book, like accessibility books or tickets that you have successfully responded to and closed. Efforts to ensure conformance over time, maybe that could include evidence of regular automated scanning of a website or app. Again, information from usability testing with people with disabilities. Anything that you do to fix accessibility issues or to try to maintain accessibility over time, you should be documenting and making available to anyone who needs to know about it. This helps you keep track of your efforts and also makes it easier to respond to any third party request for this information, which is a requirement of the EAA.

- David, just a couple things I wanted to point out here. If you're listening right now, this may sound like a lot, right? Both of the things that David and I just talked about. You may be looking at this going like, how do we... Wow, you know? So the first thing I wanna say is that there is no light switch for this. You can't turn around tomorrow and do all of these things. So as you're listening to this, really realize that it is about taking the steps, starting with the first small step, and building these things over time. And one of the things that I do is I work with W3C and their task force, creating a maturity model, right? Maturity models are these models that help organizations mature a capability over time. In this case, the capability would be how do we output accessible products, right? And baked into that is this concept of where should we start? What does excellent look like? And what are the steps to take in between? So one, that maturity model is a great resource. If you're really trying to figure out, how do I bring my organization up to this level? But secondly, don't let analysis paralysis kick in, start! Starting may be, "hey, let's do an automated scan on the website," that's easy. Starting may be looking at one page, starting may be starting the conversation. But all these things that David has gone over can be achieved one step at a time. So I think just like the priority discussion that we had earlier around remediation and around what assets to look at, it's also a priority. There's also a priority discussion on where do you start and what are the first steps and what are the subsequent steps after that.

- Absolutely. I think that sort of strategic approach, make intentional steps that are achievable and maximize your chance of success before moving on is a great way to go rather than thinking you've got to do everything at once with minimal resources. Okay, well, in conclusion, if you have a website or mobile app that EU customers can use, then you're very likely to be subject to the EAA. EAA requires providing accessible products or devices and accessible services, along with information about the accessibility of those products, devices and services, and evidence of efforts to reach and maintain conformance over time. So what you need to do is to be proactive and take a strategic approach, firstly, to addressing accessibility of current digital resources. And secondly, building organizational capacity to maintain conformance over time and to document evidence of efforts. And I think that the way that the EAA is constructed is it really encourages you to take those parallel efforts because of the requirements that it places. So it's almost rewarding organizations by investing in building accessibility maturity over time. So we have finished our presentation. We've collected a couple of useful resources, which we're sharing on this slide that I'm showing just now, but this slide will be available to everybody. Firstly a link to the text of the European Accessibility Act, which although it's a large PDF, when you dive into it, there's some really helpful information in there. Secondly, the European Act standard EN 301 549. TPGi has an EAA resource center that provides some useful resources. And Bird & Bird also has a helpful article providing more information about EAA. So at this point, I think we'll switch to taking some questions. I think there have been some-

- Yeah, David, there's quite a few questions. And what I'll do, I don't think we're gonna get to all of them so we'll answer ones we don't get to today via email.

- Yep.

- And we'll send those out to everybody. But I thought what I would do is I would start with the first ones, read them aloud. I think most of them are gonna be for Deirdre and possibly you David. And then if you all want to kick in and answer them, that would be great.

- Okay.

- So the first one, does the EAA apply to B2B, business to business? And employee facing systems, what is the relationship between EAA employment regulations, which require employers to make reasonable adjustments to internal systems, for example, HR systems and point of sale systems? So Deirdre, I don't know if you wanna take that one.

- No, I mean, it's a business to consumer piece of legislation. It can impact on business to business relationships in the supply chain because sometimes if you're selling a product that's ultimately destined for consumer market, it may impact on a business to business relationship, but it doesn't apply to employees. I should say however, you know, that the European Accessibility Act is designed to deal with the products that we talked about at the outset, the services we talked about at the outset, but there are other accessibility laws in other sectors in relation to other relationships, but not this particular one.

- Thank you. So next question, in the annex 3C, the directive states, "making websites including the related online applications and mobile device-based services including mobile applications." Can you clarify what mobile device-based services means? What kinds of services is included in mobile device-based services?

- Yeah. So if you go to the European Accessibility Act, and you see it on the slides where they were kind of paraphrased or in bullet points, but there's a schedule detailing the services that are in scope. And then the European Accessibility Act recognizes that those types of services are sometimes delivered in different ways, including in a mobile environment. So like for example, one type of service that's in scope is consumer banking. If you access your bank account via an app on your phone, that's a consumer banking service and it's delivered through a mobile app. And so that kind of tells you how the scoping exercise would be. You'd be looking at, do I have a service in the categories? Tick, tick, tick. How do I deliver that digitally to European consumers? I deliver it maybe on a browser based website, I also deliver it on an app. And so both of those potentially in scope. So you kind of have to look at the category of service in the Act, and then look at how you deliver it to determine where it flows. I don't know if either of you have something to add in on that.

- No, I think that summarizes it pretty well.

- Yeah, agreed. So the next one, and this is just clarifying, they say this... So this is for all companies and all products. Is that a true statement, Deirdre?

- No. But you know, you'd be forgiven for thinking that sometimes. And that's why I think it's really great that you folks have set up this webinar to talk to us about it. There is this scoping exercise that you have to do. So you should check to make sure whether or not it applies to you. Happy days if it doesn't, from having to do something in terms of compliance uplift. It doesn't apply to everybody though. I think if you're delivering products into the European Union. And they are digital products, and they're designed for consumers, you should go and check the list as a starting point or seek some help in navigating it. Check if your product falls into that one of the product categories or your service falls into one of the service categories. And then you'll ask yourself, oh, I think I do have a product or service in scope. Am I one of those economic operators that we talk about? Do I manufacture the product? Am I the service provider for this service? And that will give you the answer, but no, it doesn't apply to every company and it doesn't apply to every relationship in the European Union. You have to do the... You have to go on the scoping journey to determine if it applies to you. Once you've determined it applies to you, then you look at compliance and all that good stuff that Mark and David were talking about. But a lot of the preliminary exercise is to work out, am I in scope?

- So I think we have time for one more question here. When you say additional relevant EAA requirements for consumer banking services, do you mean B2 Level or are there any other requirements in EAA consumer banking services... For consumer banking services?

- I can speak to this one. So yeah, in annex, the annex providing the accessibility requirements in section four, there are two specific additional requirements for consumer banking services. The B2 one mentioned in the question relates to the reading level of information provided by the service about... That helps the consumer. We probably all... Many of us encountered incredibly difficult to read text relating to financial agreements. And this is an effort to try and ensure that consumer banking providers are communicating in plain language. But the other requirement that's specifically called out in the annex relates to ensuring that identification methods, electronic signatures, security and payment services are perceivable, operable, understandable and robust. And anyone who's familiar with the web content accessibility guidelines will recognize those four adjectives as being the four principles of WCAG. So in essence, ensuring that identification methods, electronic signatures, security and payment services are accessible to people with disabilities. So they're the specific additional requirements for consumer banking services.

- And that category is a tricky enough one because all of those things that David just eloquently listed out and mentioned, they all have other laws applicable to them. You know, a payment aspect, a processing aspect may be processing personal data. So the design elements of those aspects of a service have other laws sitting around them. So sometimes when you just comply with one law, you also have to do a quick roundup to check you're not slipping up on the other laws. So the more regulated the product, and I think the banking sector is a very regulated space regardless of the jurisdiction you're in and the adjustment on the UX there, you have to just think about it. Are you still achieving your compliance checkbox as required for your other laws, whatever they might be in that customer journey or interaction or transaction?

- Well, thank you. I think we're a little bit over time at this point. We have a lot of other great questions that people posted. As I said before, we will endeavor to answer those via email and make sure that everybody who attended this has those answers. I'd like to thank David and Deirdre, what a great webinar this was. And I enjoyed listening to both of you. And I'd like to thank everybody who attended and hope that we really helped you understand the EAA a little bit better.

- [Deirdre] Thanks folks.

- Thank you everyone.

- Bye-bye.