Accessibility Club Summit 2024 - Part One

During the start of June, I travelled to The Netherlands to attend the Accessibility Club Summit which also marks the 10-year anniversary of the Accessibility Club.

It was my first time going to an accessibility-centred conference so I wasn't sure what to expect, but as other people have said: "sharing is caring" and this community is all about sharing their learnings to help others - we learned not only from the speakers, but also from the attendees. The BarCamp format helped a lot with this where attendees can propose topics to discuss with others, and the organisers actually encouraged us to go to these sessions since the main talks were recorded.

I wrote about the summit briefly on my LinkedIn but wanted to go into more detail with what I've learned over the weekend, and will start off with my BarCamp morning.

Country Regulation Tetris - Stefan Farnetani

As someone who's worked with web accessibility remediation on a government-run website, learning about how different countries regulate compliance interests me.

Content and Technical Audits

We firstly learned that The Netherlands can split their audits into two different types of audits: "content" and "technical", where content means text, images, and colours on the page, and technical is what makes the content an article (e.g. article tag). This is done to save time and money for organisations, especially for those using the same design system.

For example, UK government organisations use the GOV.UK Design System. The components/technical aspect would be the same, but the difference would be in the content where the Ministry of Defence would be separated by Department of Education.

Definition of "New" Feature in Existing Services

On the European Commission website, it states that under the European Accessibility Act (EAA): As of 28 June 2025, companies must ensure that the newly marketed products and services covered by the Act are accessible. But was does "newly marketed" mean?

In Germany, this is a large change/feature that was described to us as code "pushed to the main branch". A newly marketed service can also be defined as having a new domain, such as a11y.club having the subdomain sessions.a11y.club.

In terms of hardware, security updates wouldn't count as a new feature but any changes in user experience would.

Difference in Monitoring Compliance

In Germany, there are federal organisations while The Netherlands have four organisations responsible for monitoring accessibility compliance. Fines also differ between the European countries - in The Netherlands it starts from 5,000 Euros, France from 50,000 Euros, and Germany has a maximum of 100,000 Euros for each product/service.

Other Topics

Sadly we ran out of time to discuss these, but other topics included which guidelines does each country follow; the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) or EN 301 549? This question follows from Canada's recent adoption of the EN 301 549, which is the European standard for accessibility.

Accessibility Careers - Jennison Asuncion

Jennison Asuncion

Jennison is one of the co-founders of Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) and the GAAD Foundation. He spoke about his career which spans several roles, from eLearning Manager to Product Manager, then into accessibility with LinkedIn.

As part of his work for the GAAD Foundation, he plans to collate data on salaries and share it with the rest of the accessibility community and asked if there's any other questions on the survey people would like to find out. If you have any suggestions, Jennison encourages people to reach out to him through LinkedIn.

Accessibility and Burnout

During his self-introduction, Jennison mentioned that part of his role is to manage stakeholders, negotiation, and having difficult conversations. In an ideal world, it would be great to be able to remediate all accessibility issues but "burnout is a thing and a lot of it has to do with knowing when to push or step back" - which issues are more pressing, heading levels or keyboard operability issues? To tackle burnout, it was important for Jennison to learn how to prioritise what to work on first.

After that, other professionals also shared their experience with burnout which were a result of the amount of work and constant role changes due to "strategic priorities". I could see people nodding their heads having gone through similar experiences.

How does one prevent burnout? What helped one person was exercise (swimming and hiking) and turning off technology. Jennison agreed and commented "no accessibility emergency is really an emergency that can't wait until the morning".

Lunch

After the two BarCamp style sessions I attended, it was time for lunch and I dedicated the rest of the day to listen in to the talks on the main stage which will be covered in the next blog post.