Have no shoes

6 and 10 August 2025

Shocking news

I didn’t know it, but I learned through a spam message, and an ad on Facebook, that as of 28 June 2025 new rules are binding regarding the WCAG, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. Non-compliance can even lead to fines.

Legal framework

Well, that’s what I thought, but it’s somewhat more complicated. That deadline date is in EU Directive 2019/882, but it doesn’t mention the WCAG. Directive 2016/2102 does refer to European standard EN 301 549, which contains the full text of WCAG 2.1.

Also, the rules aren’t new: WCAG 1.0 already existed in 1999, version 2.0 in 2001 and 2008, 2.2 in 2023.

EU Directive 2019/882 says that microenterprises, defined as employing “fewer than 10 persons” and having an “annual turnover not exceeding EUR 2 million or an annual balance sheet total not exceeding EUR 2 million” are exempt. I don’t even have an enterprise anymore, and when I had, it had little to do with my website, and I have always been the sole author and webmaster of the site. So I am exempt. But I try to comply anyway, because I see why that is important. I mentioned that before, two years ago.

Testing

Nowadays numerous WCAG checking tools are available on the web. I found the one by Accessibe.com the most informative and easy to use. They gave me a rather good mark from the start, but there was room for improvement. I added role=button in <p> tags I use as buttons for setting colour preferences. And I slightly enhanced the contrast in the entry screen colour scheme. A good tool for checking the contrast between text and background colours is here.

Then my site was tested as compliant. Hurray! However one issue remains:

“Every page should include hidden links that allow skipping blocks”
“Each page should include hidden skip links that allow users (via keyboard or screen reader) to bypass certain blocks and navigate directly to main landmarks like the main content, menu, or footer.”

I don’t quite see the problem here. All my pages have an <h1> close to the top of the code. I marked that as <main>, and marked the navigation block at the bottom as <footer>. And when I add a link from the top to the footer (visible, not hidden), the warning doesn’t go away.

What about you yourself?

The two companies that offered me the help I don’t need to become compliant, because I already am, themselves had sites that did not comply! So are they only pretending to have the know-how and expertise, hoping that non-tech-savvy potential clients won’t notice? I recommend to always use the easy checking tools found on the web. No technical knowledge is required to see the difference between compliance and non-compliance.

Or is it an example of the old saying: “The cobbler’s children have no shoes.”?

Clean code

One WCAG compliance checking tool I found had the obvious requirement to not only be accessible, but to start out with valid website code. Makes sense. W3.org offers a good tool for that, the HTML validator. Few website builders seem to be using that, because I get 10s, 100s, sometimes over a 1000 messages when I run the check on famous sites, like Facebook, Twitter, Bluesky, Mastodon, Google, DuckDuckGo, Blogspot, Wordpress, Microsoft, Yahoo, DeepL, all Dutch banks, and even the aforementioned Accessibe.

Admittedly many messages aren’t errors, not even warnings. But quite a few are. There seems to be the widespread misunderstanding about how to close HTML tags like meta and br. Closing them with ‘ />’ is not only unnecessary, but also not recommended because it can create problems. I mentioned this point before.

Years ago I already found the batch version of W3.org’s HTML validator. I corrected many small errors then, but there were quite some left. Recently I spent a couple of days to fix many more, so that most of the HTML5 code of my site is totally clean now, with the exception of some older pages that I keep online for historic reasons.

In my opinion, more website builders and webmasters should make use of W3.org’s free tools, and create valid, error-free code. Why settle for less?