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“Euracert” European Accessibility Label

by Martin Kliehm, posted on Thursday, June 21st, 2007 at 3:00 PM. RSS 2.0

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Euracert label Accessibility organizations from three countries agreed on the mutual recognition of their respective labels. That will lead towards a harmonization of accessibility in Europe. So far AnySurfer (Belgium), Technosite (Spain), and BrailleNet (France) partnered to create the “Euracert” label. If a website is already certified with one of their labels, an additional review grants the European level. Prices vary from country to country, but the French price list quotes €1k and €500 for a re-evaluation on level double-A, €600 and €300 for level A, valid for two years.

That’s an interesting initiative that will be joined by other organizations quickly. Alas there are countries without any recognized label: nobody adopted the impractical and overpriced German DIN certification yet. In other countries like Sweden they don’t certify, they prefer to educate. Also the EU funded Unified Web Evaluation Methodology (UWEM) is part of the evaluation process and virtually unknown among developers, so there needs to be more education and outreach to increase the adoption rate.

Though it’s not perfect, it’s a step in the right direction. It’s the only European label that we have so far (unless other research projects funded by the European Commission unknowingly produce a competing label) and it’s based on a solid foundation with well-recognized national bodies.

But please, somebody replace the embarrassing flags from the language selection. Although that’s more related to usability than accessibility, these experts should know that flags represent countries, not languages. Come on, one of them is Belgian, they should know how to handle language switches on multilingual websites!

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One Response to ‘“Euracert” European Accessibility Label’

  1. Christophe Strobbe posted on July 5th, 2007 at 4:23 PM. Permalink

    Hi Martin,

    you write that the Unified Web Evaluation Methodology is virtually unknown among developers, so there needs to be more education and outreach to increase the adoption rate.

    The fact is that the Unified Web Evaluation Methodology is still under development. A new version will be available soon. UWEM has been (and will be) presented at various academic conferences, such as Technology for Participation and Human-Computer Interaction International (HCII) 2007, but I agree that presentations at technical conferences like @media and XTech would help.