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Thread: Who monitors and enforces EAA violations?
Number of posts in this thread: 5 (In chronological order)
From: Birkir R. Gunnarsson
Date: Tue, Apr 15 2025 8:06AM
Subject: Who monitors and enforces EAA violations?
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Good (insert time of day) friends
I am reading up on the European Accessibility Act, mostly for my own
curiosity.
As I understand it, every European country that implements the act is
responsible for setting up a national law, + monitoring and enforcement
bodies.
I've been trying to locate a list of countries that have implemented those
requirements, so far completely without success.
I would expect to have a table of national regulation to implement the
EAA + a monitoring body and an enforcement body (the two could be the same).
The cynic in me is wondering whether the EAA will have any teeth or
enforcement in practice given that the requirements are so vague and left
up to individual member countries to implement.
I hope the cynic in me is wrong. ;)
Thanks
-Birkir
--
Work hard. Have fun. Make history.
From: Steve Green
Date: Tue, Apr 15 2025 9:31AM
Subject: Re: Who monitors and enforces EAA violations?
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When countries enact the legislation, it will specify the monitoring and enforcement bodies. I don't expect that the bodies will be specified anywhere else unless one of us decides to do it (and I don't plan to). I don't even expect the EU to create a list of countries that have passed the legislation - they will just assume it has been done by the deadline.
The public sector equivalent of the EAA is the Web Accessibility Directive, and this certainly has teeth in the UK. When the WAD was transposed into UK law in 2018, the attitude towards accessibility changed almost overnight and the market for accessibility grew by several hundred percent. Seven years later, the law is still being taken just as seriously. I don't know if the same happened in other EU countries, but if it did, I would expect the EAA to be taken just as seriously.
I expect a few large countries in west Europe to enforce the EAA properly, such as Germany and Austria. The French will enforce it vigorously against non-French vendors, but not against French ones. The Mediterranean and eastern European countries will do little or nothing unless they need to protect a local vendor against external competition. You can never be too cynical when talking about the EU.
Steve Green
Managing Director
Test Partners Ltd
From: Nicholas Bromley
Date: Tue, Apr 15 2025 9:38AM
Subject: Re: Who monitors and enforces EAA violations?
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It's certainly not easy to get hold of that and I'm not sure there's a single source of info. But TPGi have an EAA implementation tracker of sorts you may find useful: https://www.tpgi.com/european-accessibility-act-eaa-resource-center/
Cheers,
Nick
---
Nick Bromley
Director & Accessibility Consultant
Red Kite Digital Accessibility Ltd
From: Léonie Watson
Date: Tue, Apr 15 2025 9:49AM
Subject: Re: Who monitors and enforces EAA violations?
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Birkir,
Where the Web Accessibility Directive (WAD) expects a single national
monitoring body in each EU member state, the EAA expects one or more
market surveillance authorities instead.
These market surveillance authorities are sector specific, rather than
nation specific, so there may be multiple market surveillance
authorities in each nation. You can find out more about them here:
https://single-market-economy.ec.europa.eu/single-market/goods/building-blocks/market-surveillance/organisation_en
HTH
Léonie.
On 15/04/2025 15:06, Birkir R. Gunnarsson via WebAIM-Forum wrote:
> Good (insert time of day) friends
>
> I am reading up on the European Accessibility Act, mostly for my own
> curiosity.
> As I understand it, every European country that implements the act is
> responsible for setting up a national law, + monitoring and enforcement
> bodies.
> I've been trying to locate a list of countries that have implemented those
> requirements, so far completely without success.
> I would expect to have a table of national regulation to implement the
> EAA + a monitoring body and an enforcement body (the two could be the same).
> The cynic in me is wondering whether the EAA will have any teeth or
> enforcement in practice given that the requirements are so vague and left
> up to individual member countries to implement.
> I hope the cynic in me is wrong. ;)
> Thanks
> -Birkir
>
--
Léonie Watson (she/her)
Director
https://tetralogical.com
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From: Steve Green
Date: Tue, Apr 15 2025 10:55AM
Subject: Re: Who monitors and enforces EAA violations?
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That's interesting, but the lists of organisations are in a completely unusable format, so it's pretty much impossible to find anything useful. They are 300-page PDFs with no tags (and hence no headings), no TOC and no bookmarks. The reading order is completely wrong. The text is so small you have to zoom and scroll in both directions because the documents don't reflow. It's an absolute disgrace.
There also isn't a list of sectors, so you have to know which sector you are looking for. The EAA refers to the banking sector, but the word "banking" doesn't occur at all in the list or organisations by sector. Nor do other words like "e-commerce" and "travel".
I went through the entire document and could not find any sectors relevant to the EAA. There are none for services, and the ones for electronic equipment only relate to specific factors such as radio emissions, health and safety and electronic waste. It will be interesting to see if anything changes in the next ten weeks.
Steve