MeAC – Measuring Progress of eAccessibility in Europe

People with disabilities in Europe continue to be confronted with many barriers to usage of the everyday ICT products and services that are now essential elements of social and economic life. Such eAccessibility deficits can be found across the spectrum of ICT products and services, for example telephony, TV, web and self-service terminals.

Europe’s eAccessibility deficit – some examples

• Text relay services (essential for deaf and speech impaired people) are only available in one-half of the Member States; emergency services are directly accessible by text telephone in only seven Member States.
• Mobile operators in only seven Member States provide dedicated information for customers with disabilities on their websites.
• On average, less than one-third of national language broadcasts of main public broadcasters in Europe were provided with subtitling (for deaf people) in 2006; there is wide variability (from 95% to none) in the amount of subtitling across individual countries.
• On average, less than one-tenth of national language broadcasts of main commercial broadcasters in Europe were provided with subtitling in 2006; most of this is provided in just a few countries.
• Public broadcasters in only five Member States provided any of their programmes with audio description (for visually impaired people) in 2006 and, where they did, the levels provided amounted to a very small percentage of their overall programming; only in one country did any commercial broadcaster provide any audio description.
• Only a very small proportion of key government web sites in the Member States meet the accepted minimum international standards on accessibility (12,5% passed automated testing and only 5,3% passed both automatic and manual examination).
• The share of key commercial/sectoral web sites (e.g. railways, TV, newspapers, retail banking) providing this minimum level of accessibility is even lower (only 3,9% passed automated testing while not a single site passed both automatic and manual testing).
• Only in six Member States has one of the leading retail banks installed ATMs with ‘talking’ output (enabling self-service for customers with visual impairments); across countries, on average only 8% of all ATMs that have been installed by the two main retail banks in the EU 25 Member States provide such output, with the bulk of this provided in just a few countries.