Workbook final

The U.S. Access Board is in process of updating the requirements of Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act and

Section 255 of the Telecommunication Act. As part of the effort to update electronic and information

technology requirements, the Access Board formed in 2006 a federal advisory committee to provide

recommendations. The Access Board’s Telecommunications and Electronic and Information Technology

Advisory Committee was composed of 41 organizations including technology companies, trade associations,

national disability organizations, and invited to its sessions representatives from international bodies (European

Commission; Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (Australia); Industry Canada; and Japanese

Standards Association). The representative of the European Commission is a voting member in that Federal

Advisory Committee to ensure coherence in requirements to the greatest extent possible. On February 18,

2015, the U.S. Access Board released a

proposed rule updating the 508 Standards and the 255 Guidelines

, and

made them available for public comment until May 28, 2015. The rulemaking process is expected to be finalized

soon.

The European Commission issued in 2005 the Mandate M 376 to the three European Standards Organizations

(CEN, CENELEC and ETSI) to develop accessibility requirements for the public procurement of ICT products and

services. They accepted the mandate and the work of M/376 was managed by a CEN-CENELEC and ETSI Joint

Working Group eAccessibility, with AENOR Secretariat and a Team of Experts. In January 2014, CEN, CENELEC

and ETSI were pleased to announce the publication of the EN 301 549 ‘Accessibility requirements suitable for

public procurement of ICT products and services in Europe’, as the first European Standard for accessible ICT

products and services. The standard has been accompanied by an online accessible ICT procurement toolkit, to

help its implementation. It was updated in April 2015 (v.1.1.2). As agreed under the Dialogue, experts of the U.S.

Access Board were participating in the work of the standard development.

Thanks to this collaboration, these two standards aligned on a number of important aspects. For instance, like

Section 508, which avoids the purchase of non-accessible technologies, also the EN 301549 (a voluntary

standard) can be used to comply with the obligation of the European Public Procurement Directive, which also

obliges to take into account accessibility for persons with disabilities.

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Standards development takes a long time, so the challenge has been to maintain close contact to help ensure the

standards do not go in different directions. Countries have unique regulatory and standards development processes and

time must be taken to understand the limitations and mechanisms of these processes. Close trans-atlantic cooperation

was difficult due to the differences between the two legislative & standards models (being the Section 508 binding

legislation, and the EN 301549 a voluntary standard), the process to push this policy forward and the stakeholders

involved in it. Despite this, both administrations worked to have a common approach to e-accessibility. The regular

meetings and the integration of voting members in each drafting committee were ensuring an intense and continuing

cooperation. This US-EU cooperation, by its scale, is unprecedented in the field of accessibility in ICT.