Insights
Accessibility
WCAG and EN 301 549 as engineering work rather than a compliance checkbox — which standard actually binds a European product today, and what conformance costs when it is designed in rather than retrofitted.
Where we stand
Accessibility is cheap to design in and expensive to retrofit, and almost every organisation discovers this in the wrong order. The costly version is finding out after launch that a custom component cannot be operated by keyboard and has been reused across forty screens.
Automated checkers find a meaningful minority of real issues and should run in continuous integration. What they cannot assess is whether a label means anything, whether the focus order matches the visual order, whether an error message explains the problem, or whether a flow can be completed by someone who cannot see the layout. Those require a person and a screen reader.
The legal position is more specific than most summaries suggest. The European Accessibility Act points at the harmonised standard EN 301 549, whose current version cites WCAG 2.1 AA — so 2.1 is what binds today, even though building to 2.2 AA now costs almost nothing extra and removes a future migration.
We do implementation rather than audit, and keep the two separate on purpose. The team that built something is not the right team to certify it, and we will not issue a conformance statement for our own work.
Contact
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Tell us what you are building — or what keeps breaking. You will get a considered reply from an engineer, not an autoresponder.