- Good morning, 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. I see a few people trickling in, so we're just gonna give it one more minute and we'll start momentarily. Okay, thank you everyone for joining us today for our webinar Time's Almost Up: The European Accessibility Act is Nearly Here. Before we get started, I just have a few housekeeping items I'd like to get to. So firstly, this session is being recorded and we will email everyone the recording after the event. Secondly, closed captions are available, so feel free to turn those on and use them as needed. Next, we'll have time for a live Q&A later in the webinar. So please use the Q&A box and we'll answer as many questions as we can at the end of the presentation. Just a reminder, sometimes the chat can be a little hard for us and things can get lost in there. So if you do have any questions you'd like to answer, it's easier for us if you put them in the Q&A box, it's higher likelihood we'll find them. But we will be monitoring both. And then just lastly, if anyone needs any accessibility support training or usability testing, we will send out an email with a link to schedule a time to speak with one of our experts. So with that, I'll pass it off to our presenters and let them provide an introduction for ourselves and we can get started. Take it away, everyone.

- Thank you, Anthony. And thank all of you for joining us for Times Almost Up: The European Accessibility Act is Nearly Here, and it is nearly here. I'm Mark Miller. I'm director of sales here for TPGi. I am privileged to be joined by both my colleague David Sloan, who is chief accessibility officer here at TPGi, and Tom Gates, who is the senior associate at Reed Smith.

- Hey everyone.

- Oh yeah, you wanna introduce yourself further, David?

- Yeah, just to say I'm a European, but based in the US. I've been with TPGi almost 12 years now. So looking forward to sharing some updates on the European Accessibility Act and how everyone can get ready for the the upcoming deadline.

- Great. And Tom?

- Thanks, Mark. Morning, afternoon, everyone. Yeah, my name's Tom. I'm a senior associate at law firm Reed Smith. I'm a tech regulatory lawyer by trade. I do anything digital data, and that includes digital accessibility. So I'm gonna help guide you today, give you a bit of a brief overview on what to do, remind you not to panic as we're getting closer and closer to the real deadline. And just give you a steer on some key tips that you can take away and really put into action. My firm, Reed Smith, is a global law firm. We have offices all over the world, and that's been really helpful for advising clients on this particular matter, on the EAA, because we've been able to look at some of the parallels we can draw from US compliance work, like ADA compliance, which I'm sure many of you are familiar with. So very much looking forward to speaking to you all today.

- Thank you, Tom. And if you go to the next slide, Dave, I will go over our goals for this webinar. So what we're gonna look at today is understanding your obligations under the European Accessibility Act, the key steps to take before the June, 2025 deadline, which I think most of you're probably wondering, and assessing what you've done so far and what needs to be done. So looking at that gap. And then once we're done with that, we're gonna dive into some of the frequently asked questions that we get on the subject. And before we dive into everything, we have a wonderful disclaimer, which I will read to you and then we'll dive in with Tom. So this presentation has been prepared by Reed Smith LLP and TPGi for informational purposes only. The material discussed during this presentation should not be construed as legal advice or legal opinion on any specific facts or circumstances. The content is intended for general information purposes only, and you are urged to consult a lawyer concerning your own situation and any specific legal questions you may have. With that, I'll hand it over to Tom.

- Great, thanks, Mark. Perfect way to start out with a disclaimer ahead of passing over to a lawyer. So yeah, by this point, I think a lot of us are relatively aware of the EAA's general objective of making consumer products and services in the EU accessible. But this part of the webinar, I'm just going to give a quick refresh to our knowledge on the basics just before we take a deeper dive. And I will say at this point, and I said that in my introduction, don't panic if it feels pretty new to you, you're definitely not alone. You know, in my conversations with the folks at TPGi, we've definitely noticed that there is a really strong uptick with interest in accessibility now for, you know, businesses globally, but it really has started in the last couple of months. So you're not alone. A lot of people are playing catch up now, with the deadline of June, obviously fast approaching, and we're really seeing people in two camps. They've either never heard of the EAA, they don't know what it means, but someone somewhere in the business has told them about it and now they're panicking or they have heard about it, they're working on compliance, but they're still panicking. So we're just here to try and give you some of the the key compliance efforts that we've seen our clients undertaking for you to take away and put into practice. We'll also discuss later in the webinar that you actually might be further along in your compliance journey than you might have realized. But just turning to this specific slide, who and what does the EAA apply to? A quick refresher. The EAA doesn't just cover digital accessibility. So physical products, some of them are in scope, these are set out on the slide. And generally speaking, these are what the European Commission in the EU considers to be some of the most crucial consumer products and services. So they're the ones that have to be accessible in the EU. So banking, transport, phones, e-readers, e-commerce. And in terms of the organizations which need to comply, so the EAA applies when these in-scope products and services are made available, imported or placed onto the market in the EU. So your organization doesn't necessarily need to be based in the EU. For example, you could be based in the UK or the US, China, you just need to be selling your products or services there. So for example, e-commerce, your service might be based entirely in the US or China, but you deliver to countries in the EU, you would be in scope. So that obviously means that the scope of the EAA is pretty wide, has a very broad extraterritorial remit that businesses need to be aware of. Although this notion of extraterritoriality, that's something we in the EU, we're getting quite used to when it comes to European legislation. So the GDPR is one that comes to mind for many. But I will just say, obviously, at the heart of all this are consumer products and services. To date, we haven't seen any indication that the EAA is going to expand to B2B services. Although that being said, those of you operating in a B2B space, you'll need to consider the obligations of your own customers and whether they are dealing with end consumers using your product or service. So you might indirectly need to provide that functionality for your own customers to pass on. So if you just go to the next slide, please, Dave, we're gonna talk here about a few myths and try and dispel them. We see these cropping up, these questions cropping up quite a lot when it comes to EAA compliance. So you know, there's loads of information out there about what the EAA is, but I'm gonna talk now about a few things that the EAA is not, specifically whether it applies to these different services. So firstly, websites and apps. There's a common misconception that every website and app in the EU needs to comply with the new rules. That's not the case. So the EAA doesn't apply on a wholesale basis to every website, every app that's available or accessible in the EU. It's more about the underlying service that's being provided rather than the way it's being delivered. So if your service is in scope, your digital online service, and yes, that service has a website or an app, yes, that website or app would need to comply, but not by virtue of the fact that it's a website or app, by virtue of the fact that it's an in-scope service. So it's all about whether your product or service is in scope, take it from there and then work out how you're actually delivering that product or service. Archived content. This is, again, another one that comes up quite a lot that does not need to comply. So archived content, which otherwise would've been within the scope of the EAA, is excluded from the scope, provided you don't make any changes to it after the 28th of June of this year. So if you've got archived blog posts, services that are no longer in use, that means that you won't have to make any changes to them. They're sort of archived and frozen in time. And then just moving on to those final three bullets, these questions come up a lot. Intranet pages, employee benefits portals, internal tools, anything that your employees might use which isn't used externally, there is no automatic requirement under the EAA or an internal employee service or systems to comply with the rules. That being said, that doesn't mean there are no rules applicable to these services. There's a whole stack of employment and anti-discrimination laws in the EU. Some of them may require the items on this slide to be made accessible by an employer, but not by virtue or under the EAA. That doesn't change the accessibility requirements with regards to these services. So if we just go to the next slide, I want to talk about another source of confusion that we tend to see on the EAA and that relates to the specific rules that you actually need to comply with. And that's because this piece of legislation is a directive. So that means it's essentially a guide for each EU member state to implement the rules into local laws. So the text of the EAA doesn't apply automatically and it's not binding on anyone, it just tells each EU member state how to implement the rules. So what you then need to do is look at the local transposition in the relevant EU member state to understand what the rules actually say. That's obviously very different to other types of regulation that you might see in the EU. It's things like the Digital Services Act, the AI Act, GDPR. They're all EU regulations and they're directly effective. As I said, this is a directive and it's not directly effective. It needs to be implemented locally by each EU member state. But how do you know which countries rules apply? If we've got 27 EU member states, they've all had an obligation to implement these rules. Which countries rules do I need to look at? For example, what if I don't have a presence in the EU, but I make my products or services available to everyone in the EU? Does that mean I need to look at the rules for all 27 countries? Unfortunately, the text of the EAA itself does not provide any guidance on how to do this. Unlike some more recent EU legal directives, which do set out a method for deciding which countries rules apply. That means you really need to take a step back and look at various principles of EU law, which might dictate the rules that you need to follow. So one of the most relevant principles or digital services, that is, in carrying out this assessment of which rules apply is the country of origin principle. And that's found in the e-commerce directive. That essentially says, and it's subject to a number of exclusions, I should caveat. It requires organizations to comply with the rules of the EU member state where they are established, in quotation marks. So oversimplifying it, based on the definition of establishment as it's been developed through decades of EU case law, if I said my organization, which is an e-commerce service, is established in Spain and it delivers to every EU country, I can look to the Spanish transposition of the EAA as the source of rules I need to comply with. The problem is the concept of establishment where you might have an establishment, it applies throughout the EU. It's not just the EAA, it applies through loads of different legislation in all different sectors. That makes the establishment assessment very tricky. And I'd strongly recommend seeking legal advice to understand the implications. It's something Reed Smith, we are walking a lot of our clients through at the moment, particularly those that have maybe decided previously they don't have an establishment in the EU and that might have been assessed previously for tax purposes, for example. So it's really important when you are making this assessment to understand if it's been visited previously, because it could have effect on things like tax liability. So definitely not as straightforward as you might think, but of course, doing something is always better than doing nothing. So I definitely recommend that while you're maybe determining specifically which transposition of the EAA applies to you, use the directive itself as a guide on how those rules might look locally. You'll see a lot of those rules in annexes one and two. They provide some more prescriptive requirements on the rules that you need to follow. But a lot of the foundation of the EAA is built on existing accessibility standards and existing EU standards on accessibility, which I'll talk about in the next slide. So the good news is that largely we are expecting compliance with the EAA to be measured against, as I said, existing global and EU standards, which your development engineers, web teams, hopefully might already be somewhat familiar with. And this speaks to the point about already being further along in your compliance journey than you might think. So firstly, if we think about existing digital accessibility standards, the one everyone will be thinking of is WCAG, the web content accessibility guidelines, probably the most well known guidelines when it comes to implementing accessibility in the digital space. And it just so happens that the four guiding principles of WCAG, perceivable, operable, understandable, robust, very conveniently are the same four guiding principles that appear in the EAA. Great news. So that already indicates there is significant crossover between WCAG and the EAA, which is obviously a big relief to a lot of businesses because so many services, particularly in the US, may already be subject to these requirements or may already comply with them. So as I mentioned before, you might already be taking some steps to comply with these principles. And then thinking about existing EU standards, very similarly, we've got the very casually titled EN 301 549, which is baked into most accessibility consultant's brains. That, again, is guided by the same four accessibility principles. It incorporates WCAG 2.1 Level AA. And the reason that EN 301 549 is so relevant is because it's an officially published in the European journal standard. And the EAA says that if there are any existing standards which overlap in terms of principles compliance, if you comply with that standard, you're deemed to comply with the EAA to the extent there's an overlap. So that essentially, in fewer words, means that if you're looking at compliance with EN 301 549, it's likely that you're gonna be well on your way to compliance with the bulk of the technical requirements of the EAA. Should say that this European standard, as I said, it incorporates WCAG 2.1, it's due to be updated in early 2026, and it will specifically include guidance on how to comply with the EAA 'cause at the moment, it doesn't. It will also include the sort of steps that your developers, engineers might need to take in order to advance your compliance. So I think this will be a massive help and it will provide a lot of clarity on how far businesses are expected to go when it comes to compliance with these four principles. I should also say, when it's updated, it's also going to incorporate WCAG 2.2 Level AA. But until we have this updated standard sometime early next year, WCAG 2.2 Level AA is a really good baseline to align yourselves against. And I would say that, you know, we're hearing in the market people say that, you know, EAA is so much more than WCAG, and that's completely true. But at the same time, if you don't know where to start and you don't know how to even begin this accessibility journey, WCAG 2.2 and its success criteria are a really great place to start. And you have to start somewhere and doing something is better than doing nothing. So if you don't know where to start, I'd highly recommend looking into that as a first step. I would also caveat that ultimately the EAA does refer back to these principles, these four principles you see here. And it's designed to be tech agnostic, so it doesn't have to keep being updated. So if a particular technology, product, or service might fall between the gaps and say it's not covered by the likes of a published standard like WCAG, that doesn't mean it's excluded from compliance requirements. You'd still, at the end of the day, be expected to make your product or service generally compatible with these four principles, even if there were no explicit rules that would relate to their specific features. Can you just go to the next slide please? Now, just to talk a bit about some exemptions and exceptions to complying with the rules. Obviously, it wouldn't be EU law without some sort of derogation. We wanted to cover these because, again, these get discussed a lot. The scope of them get discussed a lot, so we just wanted to list them out here. So starting with micro-enterprises, you see this word a lot in EU legislation. It's defined there on the slide. But if your business would otherwise need to comply with the EAA, but it's considered a micro-enterprise, the accessibility requirements don't apply. Secondly, disproportionate burden. There are some very limited exceptions to the accessibility rules where compliance would result in a disproportionate burden or require a fundamental alteration of the product or service. If you look at annex six of the EAA, that sets out the criteria for assessing disproportionate burden. We think regulators are going to be quite tough on anyone who seeks to overly rely on these. The text of the EAA makes clear that you should only apply these exemptions to the extent necessary. So for example, if there are certain elements of your product or service, which you can easily make accessible, but certain ones that would fall under this exemption, you would need to make those changes where you could, you couldn't just fully exempt yourself from compliance generally. And I should also say that if you are planning to rely on these, you need to inform your local authority that you're doing that. So again, I think that's put in place to make sure that people aren't overly relying on this exemption when they shouldn't be. The third exemption here, which I've mentioned in the previous slides, are archived websites and apps. So as would make sense, any sort of footage, articles, archived content which was produced before the rules came into force or before they come into force in June, will not be required to comply with the rules, provided you do not touch them after that date. And then looking at the final box there, the transitional period. So although we're talking about these rules coming to force in June, 2025, the EAA does provide a transitional period which ends in June, 2030 for products which are already on the market, which may contain an in-scope service. So for example, a physical e-reader, which provides an ebook service, they'd both be in scope, you need to update the service, but the product, the physical product, provided it was on the market before the June deadline, you can continue to sell that until 2030. And then additionally, the same applies to self-service terminals. So if a self-service terminal is in use before the 20th of June, 2025, they can continue to be used for another 20 years before they need to comply. So that's to June, 2045. So quite a long transitional period for self-service machines. And if you look at the recitals, the sort of introductory text of the EAA, that makes clear that the European Commission acknowledge how expensive replacement of the sort of bespoke terminals can be. So if we just go to the next slide, we've talked a bit about what the rules are, where to find them, the general obligations, but what happens if we don't comply? That's one of the main questions we've been getting and, you know, it's a question that always comes up. You know, what are the benefits of complying versus not complying? Who enforces the rules and who's checking that we're complying with them? So again, because this is a directive, it's up to each EU member state to appoint an authority, a market surveillance authority to monitor compliance with the rules. So some countries like Czechia, Czech Republic, they are appointing authorities per sector. So transport, e-commerce, digital, that sort of thing. Others are just assigning one regulator to the entire compliance with the act. So Germany, for example, has, in the last two weeks, announced the market surveillance authority of the states for the accessibility of products and services. So one body which will monitor compliance throughout the country with the rules. There is a duty to make it known to the public who the authorities are in each country. I haven't seen any huge publicity efforts on this to date, but I think that might change after the June deadline hits and authorities are empowered to monitor for compliance. So that's who regulates it. But what happens if one of the authorities considers that you haven't complied? You know, we get past the deadline and they say you have, you know, breached the rules. Again, the EAA doesn't set out what will happen if you don't comply. It's, again, left up to the member state of the EU to decide. There's a general requirement, and you can see that on the third bullet there, that any penalties or enforcement action is effective, proportionate, and dissuasive. And again, you see that throughout European legislation. We're already, though, seeing very different approaches between member states in their respective stances against non-compliance. So taking Ireland, for example, certain non-compliance can result in fines of up to 60,000 euros, but in very extreme, specific, and repeated non-compliance scenarios, it could result in a prison sentence. Whereas other jurisdictions like Italy, we're seeing levels of GDPR fines. So we've got sort of percentages referring to annual turnover, but with no criminal liability. So we are seeing really varied approaches between countries. Some with really small maximum fines, some with very large ones, which is why it's so important to make sure that you've correctly assessed which country's rules you need to comply with. Because if it's one with criminal sanctions, that's gonna be something you want to put on the radar of your board of directors. It's very different to the US landscape where we tend to see things like class actions, private lawsuits. In the EU, as with a lot of compliance and regulatory work, we will expect regulators to be the ones pushing forward compliance and to take action for non-compliance. So very similar to what we see for data protection. In addition to any penalties that are set at a member state level, the national authority who are monitoring compliance, they can actually order you to withdraw your product or service from the market in the EU until you take corrective action to bring it into compliance. So essentially barring you from any business with that product or service. So quite extreme examples of action that can be taken if you avoid taking corrective action. So if you just go into the next slide, I appreciate that all sounds quite scary, not doom and gloom. You might be a bit closer to compliance than you think. As I said, particularly those clients who are on the call today with maybe a US or some otherwise global presence, we are seeing clients, especially closer to this deadline, discover that they're actually doing more than they think they're doing in the accessibility space, maybe because of the regulatory landscape in the US. So meaning that they're actually already on their way to compliance with the EAA without even knowing it. As I mentioned earlier, EAA, it's principles-based, it's gonna be largely measured against existing global standards. We are expecting, therefore, some clients to be further in their journey than they may have thought they were purely because these standards already exist and are out there. Similarly with things like the ADA, Americans Disabilities Act, even though there's, you know, there are differences, there are some similarities in overlap between the two pieces of legislation. Some similar but not identical efforts are required to achieve, for example, compliance in terms of technical requirements. So again, there are places you can pull existing compliance efforts from to help push you towards compliance with the EAA. I'm just gonna pass it over to David now to talk a little bit more about the technical requirements and why compliance with them helps contribute to your overall EAA compliance.

- Yeah, I mean, I think that the fact that WCAG 2.1 AA has become a fairly recognized baseline technical standard of accessibility for ADA both for title three in terms of settlement agreements, that's been the level of accessibility that settlement agreements have specified needs to be met. And in title two, the web content and mobile app rule that was published last year by the Department of Justice, that specifically sets WCAG 2.1 AA as a minimum baseline for compliance. It's something that a lot of organizations are already working towards and they're familiar with. It isn't the latest version of WCAG, but still it's a solid baseline to work towards and whether or not you're directly subject to the EAA or you are working with a customer, a partner who is, that work towards processes and practices for implementing WCAG 2.1 AA will help contribute to conformance with EN 301 549 and also the baseline requirement for EAA as of June this year. Clearly, once EN 301 549's updated version is published, then the work is to transition from WCAG 2.1 to WCAG 2.2. The good news is that the step change is not that significant in terms of new success criteria to meet. So it gives you an opportunity to start with that baseline of WCAG 2.1 and then work towards 2.2 ready for when EN 301 549 is updated and published early in 2026.

- I think what's really good about the fact that we're looking at existing standards is there's just so much, there's so many materials out there already for understanding what compliance looks like, and there are so many free tools and guides at YouTube tutorials, that sort of thing, which means that there's so much resource out there, it's not brand new. I think there's two sides to that coin though, because that means that regulators will probably be less sympathetic with organizations that are noncompliant purely because these standards have been around for a while. So it kinda takes with one hand, gives with another, but I think ultimately it's great for organizations with maybe little resource or budget to attribute to these sorts of things. So if we just go to the next slide, we were talking a bit about the overlap between WCAG, ADA, and all those sorts of things, but there are obligations in the EAA, which are new and we haven't seen before, and they can't be found in existing legislation. So those kind of key concepts really need to be studied carefully because you're not gonna be able to comply with them by complying with WCAG for example. So the big thing here is accountability, and it's something we see all across EU legislation. It basically means that every obligation you see in the EAA is actually two obligations. Firstly, you have to do what the obligation tells you, but secondly, you need to be able somehow to demonstrate this compliance to a regulator. Typically, that would be keeping some sort of document or audit report showing how you've complied. And you can see throughout the EAA, there are references to accountability and demonstrating compliance. So for example, and there's a couple on the slide here, there are obligations to publicly publish a statement, an accessibility statement, on how you've made your products or services accessible. There are various obligations throughout to disclose to your national regulator instances of non-compliance, which you might have identified, and also various rights throughout of authorities to request any information necessary from you to determine whether you've complied. So for example, if a market surveillance authority in a relevant member state, they consider that you may not have complied one of your products or services, they can ask you to provide information to prove otherwise. So because they've got such wide audit and disclosure rights, it's really crucial that you have that documentation, assessment position paper, audit, whatever it is ready to go. So you can provide it if an authority asks for it, because that's how you make your efforts current by being able to show that you've made those efforts. And because the EAA is so principles based, it's also really important that you have a strong defensible written position as to why you think your product or service is consistent with EAAs principles to rebut any argument that a regulator might have that it isn't consistent with those principles. So we're just gonna move on now from accountability to David, who will talk a bit about the approach that you can take to assess your compliance with the EAA's rules.

- Thanks, Tom. And yeah, the best approach to take is really firstly to consider current state and identify and address the current products and services you're responsible for that are covered by EAA and in parallel and longer term, to build capacity within your organization to meet and maintain conformance over time, given that the EAA isn't like a one stop, get it done by June 28th, and then we forget about everything on June 29th. Maintenance of conformance over time, an obligation to take action when a product is found not to conform or a service found not to conform is just as important as getting to that conformance level in the first place. So first of all, the effort to address conformance in existing products and/or services that you're responsible for requires you to inventory what you've got, inventory your existing digital products and services to establish what's in scope, what are you responsible for that is listed as being covered by the EAA. As Tom said earlier, there are certain products and services that are consumer-facing that are covered and there are other products and digital services that are not covered. So focusing on what your digital estate, your products to figure out what's covered will help you figure out where to prioritize your efforts. And this word prioritize is something I'll repeat multiple times because, you know, it's a great way to focus resources on an area that has most impact. So in a prioritized approach, audit the existing products and/or services in that inventory to identify areas of non-compliance with EAA requirements. And you can do this through a couple of approaches. For digital services, like websites and mobile apps, automated testing, manual testing can get you information on the extent to which your digital service conforms to applicable standards. You may perform manual accessibility testing of a product as well to to assess its conformance with the relevant accessibility requirements. A second and equally valuable approach, and again, this is something we'll come back to multiple points for the rest of this presentation, is to gather feedback from users with disabilities. It's one thing to test against standards, it's just as important to get feedback from people who are affected by accessibility barriers. So figuring out any information that you've already received, if not actively seek information, for example, conducting usability testing to understand where you are to figure out what action you can take to move forward. And then based on that evaluation for each product or service that you've audited, prioritize remediation efforts. You know, you've found that there are areas of non-conformance. You need then to address those areas of non-conformance and you can do so on a prioritized basis to make sure that you're fixing, you're starting with the most high impact fixes that you can make and this is especially important if you have limited resources available to address the issues that you've discovered. So a prioritization based on ideally a combination of the severity of impact on users affected by an issue and the effort to fix, you know, something that's easy to fix and when you fixed it, it has a significant positive impact. That's something you should be doing first and early. And having that documented prioritization effort that's all part of the story that you can tell to anyone who needs to know what steps you're taking to improve your product or service. And while you're in this process of remediation, which for certain products may well take a very long time if it's even achievable, support people affected by known barriers while they're being fixed so that people who are affected by a barrier aren't left, you know, to deal with an accessibility barrier. If there's any way to support those users, then explore that and implement that. So that's kind of addressing what you have at the minute. But then in parallel, it's essential to build organizational capacity over time to provide accessible products and services. And you can start by communicating the obligations that your organization has under EAA to all relevant stakeholders and to provide them with role-based accessibility training so that they know what their role is in the organization's approach to implementing an accessibility strategy. You know, we know from many years experience that giving everybody all the accessibility training is not a recipe for success. Role-based accessibility training so you know what you need to do and have a sense of what others' responsibility is, but your focus is as a stakeholder with a particular role to have that knowledge relevant, accessibility knowledge relevant to your role is the best way to help people feel empowered that they can have a positive impact. Integrating accessibility into processes for building and providing new products and services is really important. You know, it's one thing to fix products that have been, products or services that have been built to address existing barriers, but it's a much more effective long-term investment to integrate accessibility early and throughout the process for building and testing a product or service. Investing in and making use of automated testing and scanning tools for checking accessibilities, particularly for digital services provided through websites and apps. That's a really valuable way of speeding up efficiency and accuracy. And another approach to take, I mentioned before, including people with disabilities in user research throughout the design, development, and building of a product or service helps you balance the value given by following standards to ensuring that the people that your accessibility efforts are intended to benefit, actually benefit from those efforts. And partnering with people with disabilities early in the product or service development process helps ensure that whatever it is you're building has been informed by the needs of people with disabilities. So that your accessibility efforts are focused on optimizing the user experience as opposed to conforming with a technical standard without really thinking about the people who are intended to benefit. Including accessibility in supply chain and procurement processes is essential, especially for product manufacturers who may be relying on third parties, you know, to provide components or other functionality of a product. Ultimately, if you're responsible for putting a product on the market, if you're responsible for a digital service that relies on third party technology, for example, for managing payments or for a security challenge, before somebody can log in order to access a service, you need to be making sure that your suppliers, your partners understand their responsibility for accessibility, otherwise you're on the hook for their inaccessible product or service. So understanding your supply chain, your partners, and making sure that their accessibility expectations are known to them. This is a critical part of managing accessibility strategically. As Tom mentioned, keeping and maintaining and updating documentation of conformance is essential, you know, for internal record keeping so you know where you are and what you've done to address issues that you've discovered, but also to have available to present to any market surveillance authority or anyone else who legitimately needs to see that information. It's also important to keep track of changes to requirements and changes in product or service functionality over time. It's possible that new requirements may emerge. I mean, we're already expecting to see EN 301 549 updated and published early next year. So keeping track of any additional requirements, any changes in that updated standard compared to the current version will help you be ready to anticipate what you might need to do to implement those requirements. And for a given product or service, if it changes and particularly a digital service, when somebody adds new functionality or there's some other change made, you gotta make sure that that change doesn't lead to a loss of conformance because then you have to act and document what you've done to act. And that speaks to that final plan to have a plan to address non-conformance and be ready to implement that as soon as any an issue of non-conformance is identified. So with that, we're gonna shift to answering preemptively some frequently asked questions and I'll hand over to Mark to take this forward.

- Thanks, David, and thanks, Tom. Great information so far. And the one thing I would say, just on the heels of everything that David told you about sort of, you know, how to action, right? How to action now and how to action kind of in the future is to not let all of that get too overwhelming per Tom's early on point. Like, don't panic. It is a lot and a lot of it, it has to be done kind of in serials. So the best thing that you can do is to start acting and whether that is simply by grabbing a free tool or initially getting a manual audit on one of your assets that may be affected by the EEA or even a single user flow, like, start to make some progress and small steps are better than no steps. So don't let that analysis paralysis kick in. All this stuff will, you know, you'll have time for as you continue to progress. So as David said, we're gonna go into some frequently asked questions that we have prepared for you here. We also have some questions that you all have been asking, so we'll try to get through these relatively quick. We have about 15 minutes because it would be great to get to your questions as well. So the first one is is what are the key dates for compliance? We get this one all the time.

- Yep, so I'll take that one. Touched on this earlier, but we just put all the relevant dates here on this slide. They don't make it easy for you because there are various different dates depending on which product or service or product type we're looking at. You know, on one hand, that's adds a bit of confusion, but at least it does make the accessibility efforts iterative because some you can maybe put off for now. So any products which have been placed on the market, which would otherwise have been in scope, if they're placed on the market before the 28th of June this year, you'll have another five years for making those products compliant. The same applies to any self-service terminals, things like ATMs, ticketing machines at shops and banks. If they were placed and, you know, put into use before the 28th of June date this year, they'll have up to 20 years to stay in service. That doesn't mean you should be using 'em for 20 years, but it just takes account of the fact that, you know, if you had put a brand new self-service terminal in place on the 27th of June, 2025, you, you know, quite rightly might have intended that this product was going to be used by your customers for the next 20 years or so. So it acknowledges that. But the main date, as we said, 28th of June, 2025, all services must comply. There's no transitional period for services which were in place for this date, a new product. So any product which is in scope and is placed on the market after or on the 28th of June needs to comply. So it's really just those existing products that are already on the market that can take advantage of the transitional period.

- Thank you, Tom. All right, so looking at that June 28th, 2025 date, what exactly does need to be made conformant by then?

- So yeah, just moving on from those different deadlines, this specifically to this June one, we've got all services, as I said, all products placed on the market after this time, always be aware of the various exceptions to the deadline and make sure that you're taking advantage of them because again, you might panic and think I've got all of this work to do by June, but actually you might have 20 years if it's in relation to a self-service terminal. So really drill down, have a look at the specific product or service if it's in scope, and try to understand if any exemptions apply. Similarly with any of your content, if it's archived, for example, it's historic, you don't use it or update it, look at the exemptions and have a think about whether they would apply to that content as well.

- All right, and then the next question we get quite often is sort of a hopeful one and that is meeting WCAG 2 point AA, oh, I'm sorry, I thought this was a automation question. Is meeting WCAG 2.1 AA sufficient for services to conform?

- So I'll take this one. So Tom mentioned earlier, yeah, it doesn't mention WCAG, although it does mention the four principles outlined in WCAG as the fundamental structure of WCAG. So meeting the accessibility requirements set out in EAA is the priority and that means ensuring products and services are designed to, and I'll quote from the text of the EAA, designed to maximize their foreseeable use by people with disabilities. And that's a kind of focus on ensuring usability by people with disabilities. EEA leaves it open to how a product manufacturer service provider meets those accessibility requirements. And in theory, yes, you could take any approach to ensure that the product or service meets accessibility requirements. However, the fact that we have technical standards that are very good baselines that allow people to build efforts on means that they can really help demonstrate, but not necessarily guarantee a service's conformance with every requirement under EAA. So we would say meeting WCAG 2.1 Level AA now is a really good baseline achievement that can help you towards conforming with EAA. WCAG 2.1 Level AA won't be sufficient once the updated EN 301 549 standard is published because that will incorporate WCAG 2.2. So starting now, yes, it's a good idea to continue your efforts to meet WCAG 2.1 with a view to transitioning into meeting 2.2 early in the new year and ideally meeting the requirements, the applicable requirements in EN 301 549, depending whether it's a website or a piece of software or native mobile app will also help you demonstrate conformance with accessibility requirements. So in summary, it's a little bit messy, but in in essence, adopting WCAG 2.1 AA now for a website or mobile app that's subject to EAA is a good significant step forward helping you meet your requirements, but there is that extra step making sure that people can use your product. And the best way to do that is through user research with people with disabilities.

- And the next question, there's all these wonderful automated tools that we've mentioned earlier to check for conformance against the guidelines. Are they sufficient to check for full conformance?

- So I'll take this one. I think you're gonna know the answer as Dave mentioned, no, essentially no. Automated testing is, you know, very valuable part of an accessibility strategy and you know, plays, you know, a really important role in understanding the gaps in compliance, but human interaction is key and it's where we see clients have the most success in making their services, their products accessible. It's by having their employees with accessibility needs or focus groups provide real-time feedback on the issues they're coming across. And again, speaking to that accountability point and demonstrating compliance, having a record of users with accessibility needs having successfully used your product or service is a great way to demonstrate that your product or service is meeting their requirements. So it's really, really valuable, this human input and interaction. Definitely.

- So we've talked a lot about how important it is to document the products and services as you just stated, Tom. So how should people go about doing that?

- So I'll share some thoughts. I mean, and I think it's important at this point to distinguish accessibility documentation for consumers, for people who are using the product or service. And essentially what you need to provide is an easy to understand and accessible description of how to use the product or service, including its accessibility features. If you provide accessibility features for a product, you need to make sure that the people who benefit from them know that they're there and how to use them. And for products covered under the EAA, that could be on the product itself, you know, labeling of features, controls, or on product packaging or in packaging or in the supporting instructions, maybe there's a website that provides information about the product. Having accessible information about the product, including its accessibility features, is essential to meet the EAA's requirements. Another thing for consumers is to make sure that accessibility support is available through call centers and other forms of customer support chatbots and other ways that consumers may need to use to ask questions about how to use the product. So making sure that accessibility information is covered and making sure that those support channels are also accessible is really important. And then the other side of the documentation coin is for market surveillance authorities. And we've talked about this a few times already in today's presentation. Product or service documentation could include, for example, an accessibility conformance report, an ACR in the VPAT format documenting conformance with EN 301 549 and that's a standard reporting template format that could be used for any digital service or product. You know, whether it's a piece of hardware or software or a website or mobile apps. That's one way, an industry standard way, to catalog the results of an audit and show level of conformance with the applicable standard. Another way to document product or service accessibility is through information on engagement with people with disabilities. Did you conduct a usability test? What were the results? How did you respond to the feedback that you received? Who did you involve in that usability study? When did it happen? Customer feedback. Are you collecting feedback from users of a product or service, users who may identify as disabled and may have reported an accessibility barrier or may be telling you that the app is usable? I mean, if it's good news, then that's all great things to, great information to document and have ready to share with a competent authority who might need to know about it. And then, you know, importantly, information on how areas of non-conformance have been or are being addressed. And that could be through information stored in a bug tracker, a product roadmap, you know, what steps are you taking to improve accessibility and when we do expect to achieve them, as well as a broader organizational accessibility, you know, any information that shows a market surveillance authority that you're taking your accessibility efforts seriously, you're investing in your organization's capacity to build and maintain accessible digital products and services.

- Yeah, I think those are all really good points. And the one thing I will point out too is that like the W3C has the Accessibility Maturity Model, the AMM, there's a lot of sort of pre-done things out there or areas where people have contemplated how do you look at your overall organizational accessibility and documenting, thinking about that in terms of not just documenting how accessible you are or how accessible you've become, but also documenting your plans, your roadmaps, the activities that you actually take to address accessibility. Because it is ongoing and it is ever-changing as your products evolve and change, the state of accessibility is gonna evolve and change as well. So a lot of the questions that you guys have, that were asked in the Q&A have actually been answered. So Tom, thanks for that. If you wanna see how Tom's answered those, you can go to the Q&A and just click the answered tab. There's a couple of other questions that came through chat and I think given the time, we will tackle those in writing too. And if we have to send those out to the attendees, we will do that as well. But before we wrap things up, let's just sort of run through I think the highlights and the main points. David or Tom, do you wanna take that or I'm happy to...

- Yeah, I can go through them. I mean, I think that what's important to say is the first deadline may be fast approaching, but don't panic. This is a long game and it requires a long-term accessibility strategy. So setting that in place and having evidence that you have done that is a great starter. And as Tom said, you may already have done more than you think you've done, so you're probably further on than you might realize. You know, understanding those obligations really helps you figure out what you need to do and what you've done already. And meeting technical accessibility standards is a very valuable baseline to adopt. But EAA conformance also requires meaningful engagement with people with disabilities and also on documenting your effort. And these are really steps beyond prior legislation in this space, but they're all steps that reward in terms of building and providing better products and services for everybody.

- Fantastic. Well Tom, thank you for coming on and giving us such great insight from the legal perspective. And David, it's always great to hear you talk about how we can achieve these things and what we should be focused on. It was fantastic being here with all of you and thanks to everybody who attended, we hope that you found some good, useful nuggets of information. I think most of the questions we answered, but we'll get to those couple that were put into the webinar chat and get those out to you as well after the webinar. So thank you very much and have a fantastic rest of your day.

- Thank you, everyone. Thank you, have a good day.

- [Tom] Thanks a lot.

- Bye.