What is A11Y

Recently, you may have heard more and more about accessibility. The closer the deadline of the European Accessibility Act approaches, the hotter the topic gets. If you have contacts in the software industry, you may also have heard of the A11Y, but what exactly is it? Let’s find out together in this article.

In 2024 we took the time to tell you about What to do to comply with the Accessibility Act. The European Commission’s deadlines were still a long way off, but time is now running out. The Directive terms will apply to products and services put on the market after 28 June 2025. If your company or your customers own software and you have not yet heard of it, I highly recommend reading this article. There you will find all the details. Instead, if you already know everything, proceed without delay.

What A11Y means

It’s quickly said: A11Y means Accessibility. In the digital sphere, Accessibility briefly means all those practices and solutions put into practice to make a digital space usable also for persons with disabilities that preclude its use through classic interactions.

Think about the disabilities that can make these tools more difficult for people to use. These can be physical, mental, intellectual or sensory impairments, i.e. impediments that make a tool as simple as a computer or smartphone tiring and frustrating to use.

But why is the word A11Y used? Why is the number 11 there? A11Y is an numeronym. It is a “cousin” of the acronym where the word is contracted by replacing the letters in the middle with their number. In this case “ACCESSIBILITY” has eleven letters in the middle and becomes A11Y. Numeronym is a term you don’t often hear in Italy, but internationally there are several examples and variants (I’ll leave you the Wikipedia link if you want to go deeper).

As mentioned at the beginning, there is more and more talk about A11Y. In fact, it has been an evolving topic for over twenty years. If one consults the history of the English Wikipedia page of Computer accessibility, the entry dates back as far as 2003. Although Artificial Intelligence (AI) is monopolising the scene of mainstream technological debate, accessibility is a train that has been gathering speed for some time now and on which many will have to get on for real, sooner or later.

If until last year the issue could be ignored, by 2025 many companies in the EU Member States will not be able to look away. As is often the case, politics dictates the agenda of socially relevant issues and companies are strongly urged to integrate solutions into the workplace. It cannot be ruled out that further policy measures may also be taken outside the EU in the coming years.

A11Y compliance, i.e. adherence to standards and guidelines for making digital spaces accessible, involves different conformities and legally they are not universally valid. For example, in the United States, the federal law Section 508 and the ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) are referred to.

However, for designers and industry professionals, the WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) remain a good reference point. They are a list of guidelines for making web content more accessible. What makes them particularly valuable is that they are internationally recognised.

How A11Y will be applied in Italy

OK, there is a European Directive and we know that Member States have to comply, but what do state laws say about this? We know that each state is different. In Italy, for example, what are the legal obligations for companies?

The European Directive had already been transposed in Italy by the decreto legislativo n°82 (27/05/2022). As for the guidelines for determining the accessibility of a digital space, their definition was entrusted to Agenzia per l’Italia Digitale (AgID). On the AgID website there is a page dedicated to accessibility and a page dedicated to guidelines for the accessibility of private digital spaces.

These guidelines follow the footprint of the standard UNI EN 301 549 (Accessibility requirements for ICT products and services). In a nutshell: web pages must fulfil the requirements of the intermediate AA level of the WCAG (for details on the A-AA-AAA scale see the document linked above).

How these criteria are achieved is yet another issue. Every company will adopt the measures most appropriate to the technologies already in use and should pay attention to the best practices to most effectively reduce the limits of disabilities. Whether through a dedicated in-house team or with the support of external consultants, the guidelines call upon a number of other extremely useful resources, not only for knowing what to do, but also how to do it.

Resources for accessibility: The A11Y Project

WCAG are not the only resources available to those designing accessible digital solutions. They are a good starting point, but there is room to discover new ways to integrate the guidelines, not to mention research and development. The web is overflowing with thematic material, so much so that it can be difficult to decide who to pay attention to in order to start taking the subject seriously. Fortunately, there are people who collected some of the most interesting resources, providing a starting point and removing the annoyance of searching for it. The A11Y Project, for example, is particularly significant to us.

The A11Y Project is a community-driven initiative to make digital accessibility easier. In other words, it is a group of professionals united by a desire to make digital spaces accessible to all.

The A11Y Project’s heart is its archive of resources. A long list of content categorised into easily searchable categories. Each topic has many links. Articles, conferences, podcasts, books… There is everything. Whether you are a developer, designer, HR or a figure involved in innovation processes you will probably find a lot of food for thought. If you are an entrepreneur, you already know what to suggest to your team to get up to speed.

How to prepare for A11Y integration

All very nice, but where do we start? Time is running out, the deadline of the Accessibility Act is imminent and there is so much to do!

First of all, if no one had told you about these measures, start informing yourself. If you have not read it at the top of the page, start from our article.

An assessment of your digital spaces is another step that cannot be missed: which apps and sites you have, how accessible they are today and what can be done to bring them into compliance, if the law requires it.

At this point the question naturally arises: who should you entrust with updating your digital spaces? The answer is obvious, you decide. We have prepared ourselves with update courses on accessibility for our team and by networking with other professionals who are working on this issue. Meanwhile, contact us and let’s start talking about it. Maybe you will choose us.