Accessibility Regulations in the EU

Accessibility regulations are taking effect in the EU next year in June. What happens to the app developers when they no longer can ignore the accessibility features as nice to have.

Regulations are meant to shape our society in a way that is fair and kind to everyone, however what developers and managers care most about is definitely not making something that makes everyone happy, some even say doing something like that would be impossible. Therefore governments see it their responsibility to intervene and make sure that nobody is left behind.

For startups and product teams it means that now they need more time to deliver the same feature in 2025 than 2024. Which is not necessarily a bad thing considering how much unnecessary features end up in a product as an MVP but without an actual plan to validate that people actually use it.

It might also make developers think more about how simple their UX is, after all the more cramped your UX is the harder it is to make it accessible. It might be the cure for fancy webpages that are just not easy to navigate, although they look great.

Another coincidence is the boom of LLMs and tooling that make coding faster. Developers don’t really need to think most of the time about what they’re coding, they can rely on code generated by LLMs, problem is most of the code in the world up until now is written with little attention to accessibility. Meaning that now it won’t be possible to mindlessly merge pull requests created by your favorite ticket to PR solution.

Overall I think it’s not the worst thing in the world to stop and think about what you’re building and how intuitive it is to the people. It might just make it grow faster even though your delivery time is increased.

However that also means now bigger companies have an advantage over startups and SMEs because they can simply create a11y (accessibility) teams and let them fix whatever unaccessible code other teams generate. Who knows maybe even LLMs will be able to do it.

If I understand the regulation correctly it will affect most B2C companies and it won’t surprise me if it leads to some new trends in UI/UX. I would expect most developers to find a way aroudn this speed bump and gain their speed again.

One thing that would be interesting to see is how accessibility is defined by the companies, I’m sure there are already many tools and standards that can define how your UI is accessible, but it doesn’t mean that if you follow all the standards your product is surely accessible.