Trends in Digital Accessibility 2024

At the end of every year, I go away for a few days to immerse myself in what’s happened in all things digital over the past year, what people are saying is going to be ‘big’ in the coming months, and consider what the impact might be on accessibility.

I’m not ashamed to say that I love it. It’s time to think, assess, and cogitate, and I hope to come up with something insightful and useful for the accessibility community.

The result is my Trends in Digital Accessibility 2024 webinar, which went down extremely well to a large audience at the end of January.

It's a few months on now, and most of the trends that I was seeing are becoming more and more clear. So here's where we started 2024, and where I believe we're going...

Where are we now?

Well, the good news is that in Jan 2024, after a year when 240k people lost their jobs in tech layoffs, there are still 11,000 people with accessibility in their job title on LinkedIn. So the digital accessibility community may not have grown since last year. But stability in the midst of a contracting tech jobs sector is not bad news.

The number of the ‘State of Accessibility Score Reports’ has dropped since 2023 – however, there has been little improvement in the numbers within them. The WebAIM Million study found that 96.3% of homepages had automatically detected accessibility failures, a slight improvement of 0.5% from 2022 (although the number of elements on homepages has gone up)

As I’ve said previously, we shouldn’t be disheartened by this, as automated tools like WAVE can only test about 30% of what’s needed for a site to be WCAG compliant. It’s possible that lots of organisations massively improved their sites’ accessibility in the other 70% of WCAG success criteria that the tool didn’t check. Or that companies focused most of their accessibility efforts this year on the accessibility of internal tools for staff with disabilities, or the accessibility of their social media communications, neither of which are yet included in these types of studies.

So, there's much more to accessibility than these studies. And often what's more important than the scores, is what's happening in organisations which results in those scores. So here is my summary of the trends, opportunities, and solutions which should inform the decisions you make in spending your organisation's accessibility budget in 2024.

I’ve picked out 8 key trends that I think will be the most impactful in digital accessibility for the coming 12 months.

1. Changes in the needs of people with access needs

There are 4 areas where I can see differences that will continue to impact employees' and customers' needs for accessibility, and how organisations can benefit from meeting those needs: 

• The economic downturn means that more people need digital accessibility more than ever. Disabled and older consumers need to be able to access cheaper, affordable shopping online. Equally, online retailers need to retain and attract customers, so need to drive customer loyalty by letting customers to know accessibility is an ongoing part of their CX processes, not just something they think about fixing every now and again.

• There was a shift during the pandemic to online. However, behaviour didn’t revert to pre-pandemic levels afterwards. Consumers now want the best of both worlds - they want the tactility of physical shopping and the convenience and choice of digital. Many organisations are now coming to us to help them meet increased accessibility expectations in-store once they've improved things online.

• The needs of "Vulnerable customers" are becoming more protected by regulators of key services such as banking and energy. Vulnerability managers are learning that accessibility is essential for them to support the needs of their audiences who have disabilities. Accessibility specialists are learning to speak the language of vulnerability, that many of the accessibility guidelines created for people with disabilities can help other vulnerable audiences, and to look into the needs of these other audiences to expand their activities.

• One key vulnerable group who needs are coming into focus are older people. They are not technologies dinosaurs, having spent the last 20 years working with computers in the workplace. They are wealthy and wish to continue their use of technology well into their retirement. But they often experience the similar accessibility challenges to people with disabilities as they age. They are the largest growing demographic who need accessibility, and in 2024 their needs are being championed by a large community in the "era of longevity".

2. Changes in accessibility legislation & regulation internationally

The legislation that will have the biggest impact in 2024 is actually from 2019 - the European Accessibility Act. This is becoming transposed into law across Europe's members states at the moment, and has a deadline for compliance of June 28th, 2025.

It expands the scope of EU accessibility requirements from websites and mobile to include kiosks, ATMs, and other hardware. It also expands the scope beyond the public sector, to private sector organisations providing services in: Banking, E-commerce, Travel, and Audio-Visual Media. It applies to all organisations selling to EU customers, not just those located in the EU.

If you work online in Europe, you'll be hearing a lot about it in the next 18 months.

In the USA, the DOJ are strengthening its position around accessibility and clarified that the US public sector needs to make apps as well as websites WCAG 2.1 AA compliant with its NPRM (although we’re awaiting a final ruling). And Mandate M-24-08 will make US government departments and agencies apply Section 508's accessibility requirements in a more consistent way, which will have a large impact on SAAS and workplace tool accessibility.

To find how these changes in legislation could impact your organisation, check out our March 2024 webinar on the EAA, DOJ NPRM and Mandate M-24-08. It could be the most important strategic thing you do in accessibility all year.

3. Changes in organisations' attitudes & commitment to delivering accessibility

More organisations are declaring their commitment to digital accessibility in diversity and inclusion than ever before. And most go way beyond a vague statement from their CEO to consider a few things about inclusion of people with disabilities as employees and customers. In 2024, commitments are about getting accessibility embedded across the entire "business-as-usual" processes of each organisation. 

These commitments are often being driven by the 3 legislative avenues above, each of which requires organisations to be compliant with accessibility guidelines like WCAG, and also publish the processes they are using to achieve this compliance in an ongoing way. 

Buyers of website creation or workplace tools are looking for products that are digitally accessible, because of the difference they see in the usability of the products and the inclusion they offer which matches the company's commitments or legal requirements.  

For the creators of workplace tools and SaaS, accessibility is increasingly being seen as a differentiator against the competition alongside a way of meeting their own inclusion commitments. There are increasing numbers of large companies who won't buy tools that aren't accessible. 

We're starting to see digital agencies who are committing to accessibility publicly to be able to sell their site and app creation services to companies that require accessibility. 

All this, is a welcome step on from the 2021 survey by Forrester which found accessibility efforts being driven by passionate teams or individual employees at 48% of companies, with only 36% of companies with a top-down commitment. Now accessibility is being more recognised by leadership, which is empowering their employees who have a passion for it to make it happen. 

4. Changes in assistive technologies

We need to rethink how we define Assistive Technology. We're moving on from the days when the Assistive Technology that most people could name was a screen reader to help people who are blind use a website or app. Now the interesting places to be looking are: 

• where technologies that used to be just in ATs have found use beyond people with disabilities, in the general public - eye tracking has been part of AT for people with disabilities for years, now in 2024 it's the most interesting thing in Apple Vision Pro according to many futurologists 

• where the AT is helping you with life beyond digital - for an example, SeeingAI on a smartphone helping navigate people around supermarkets 

• where a personalised AI interface allows you to ask an agent to find the aggregated information you're looking for from multiple websites and apps and present it back to you in an interface which suits you best. 

Currently a key tenet of accessibility is “Does your web/app work with Assistive Technologies?” . Machine-readable data presented to the user via a personalised AI agent could be the future of accessibility, and so we may need to take Tim Berners-Lee’s Semantic Web more seriously as part of accessibility: “make Internet data machine-readable so that our daily lives can be handled by machines talking to machines” (builds on discussion in: https://www.bloorresearch.com/2023/06/why-you-should-take-apple-vision-pro-seriously/) 

5. Changes in people with access needs’ awareness of, access to, and training in the use of Assistive Technologies

II've been saying this for years...

It doesn’t matter if your website or app is accessible – if people don’t know how to use the accessibility features, it makes no difference, even if it does meet WCAG 2.2 AA! Similarly, if new versions of an Operating System or devices have improved functionality over old ones, this doesn't help people who have difficulty paying for, or coping with, upgrades in their technology. You need to think about the whole experience. 

Encouragingly, in 2024 gaming has made real headway in accessibility, with accessibility features being tagged in packaging and promotions for new games, and accessibility options showing up in in-game menus.  

However, our research on banking app accessibility in 2023 showed that across many UK banking apps, while there were good accessibility features, they often weren't communicated well to those who needed them. 

The message is: being good at accessibility isn't enough – telling people how they can get the most accessible experience of what you create is essential. 

6. Changes in "enabling technologies" and how they integrate accessibility 

Enabling technologies are those tools and platforms you use to help you create your digital products more quickly – for example, JavaScript frameworks, content management systems, or no-code solutions. We've been using them for years. And the key question has always been: does the enabling technology get you to a digital product which is accessible as well as created quickly and cheaply? 

AI is obviously the newest enabler - everywhere you look it is promising to deliver content, images or code to put authors, designers, and coders out of a job. The opportunities and threats are great. But, for me, the biggest question to ask is still: where is the AI getting its training data from? We're all used to bias as a DEI idea in the workplace, especially in recruitment. But bias in AI datasets may result in your ability to create an app "for free without code" as long you don't care that the code it creates is not accessible, or finding enough free human-interest images to populate your new website, but none of them are of someone with a disability.  

In 2024, before it's too late, these are the questions that need to be asked, and accessibility demanded. 

Outside AI, we’re seeing great moves with accessible imagery - Giphy has added Alt text to animated gifs, Pinterest has added body-types to its search categories, and image libraries to source images that are inclusive and represent people with disabilities are becoming more common. These are fantastic steps forward and something I hope will become further embedded in the way we choose media for inclusion in digital projects. 

7. Changes in embedding accessibility into design patterns, components & thinking

Design trends: While some people feel human-created AI could replace designers, we don't think we're there with that yet... But 2024's design trends don't feel that new, almost like a retread... Trends like "the end of flat design", "bento grids" and "simplicity" feel like "oldies but goodies" and most are well aligned to accessibility.  

Development trends: Yes, people are pushing "no-code" to its limits with AI. We'll see... And my colleagues who train developers in accessibility say that TypeScript and the ShadowDOM are things they often do Q&As about with trainees these days.  

But the key thing we're seeing from an accessibility perspective is many organisations maturing in how they are managing accessibility from requirements, through design to code, and ensuring nothing is missed in the the transitions between BAs, designers and coders.

Handling these transitions well is critical to embedding accessibility, whether it is through: BAs embedding accessibility success criteria in JIRA user stories; coders embedding "how to use this component in an accessible way" documentation in storybook components; or designers marking up tab-orders and other annotations in Figma page designs. Importantly, we're also seeing developers pushing back and challenging designers to advocate for the use of standard components where appropriate, to drive efficiency and accessibility concurrently. 

We're spending more time than ever helping our clients with these sorts of activities, and it's a clear sign of their growing maturity, which always ends up in more accessible delivery. 

8. Changes in embedding accessibility maturity into tools, methods, processes teams, and organisations

For me, this is the still the most important thing for 2024.  

You shouldn’t just be doing accessibility, but making sure that it’s done efficiently.  

For small organisations, this can be working out that spending money on training staff in accessibility saves you huge amounts of fixing after audits.

For larger ones, it can be biting the bullet to bring together all the disparate accessibility work across an organisation into a central Accessibility Centre of Excellence, which will pay dividends when it comes to consistency.  

Or it could be an accessibility specialist working out that AI may eventually get good enough to put them out of a job doing WCAG audits, so they start to think deeper, going above and beyond WCAG, into training and mentoring teams, and understanding how to embed accessibility throughout organisations to reach the next level in sustainable accessibility delivery. 

ISO 30071-1 is the standard that can help you embed digital accessibility smartly and efficiently in your organisation. If this is something you’d like to benchmark, I’d encourage you to complete our Digital Accessibility Scorecard so you can see where you are in your accessibility maturity right now. 

Want to know more?

This is a summary of some of the 11 Trends I talked about in our January webinar. You can find the full webinar with transcript and links on our free resource, HiHub, if you’d like to hear, or read in more detail, I’d encourage you to take a look.

If you'd like to talk to me about how we can help your organisation with any of the points I've raised here drop me a line if we can be of help.