- computers and operating systems
- ATMs, ticketing and check-in machines
- smartphones
- TV equipment related to digital television services
- telephony services and related equipment
- access to audio-visual media services such as television broadcast and related consumer equipment
- services related to air, bus, rail and waterborne passenger transport
- banking services
- e-books
- e-commerce
For my part, I would dream of this regulation mandating backward support for browsers at least seven years back to stop the nowadays framework madness. As a great example, my bank login page is 10MB.
[1] https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/policies/ju...
Current banks login pages are a bit below 3 MB.
I see it as a prioritization issue. Are you happy with your bank services except the size of the (login) pages? Probably they focus on what they should as there would be more customers switching due to bad service than to page sizes. There are probably few scenarios where 10 MB is a problem - most of it should get cached anyhow after the first load.
I think it's absolutely normal to be an expert (in web development) and measure businesses based on their web apps. And yes, if an organization where online is a critical point, such as banks nowadays, ignores the problems with their code, this is most probably a sign that the entire organization is broken.
In my case this is a 100% match.
Please shoot me if it gets over 1MB!
Once I faced an issue with the SBB ticket system (Swiss rail tickets) that was not working on my iPhone (maybe 8), not in Safari on macOS, and I needed to buy a ticket on the train as in this particular place there was no offline ticket service.
Such services indeed must have a minimal requirements version.
Source: I used a frontend developer working on a big bank frontend. The existing UI stack was horrendous and deadlines and bank politics wouldn’t allow you to refactor anything. Just build shit on top and hope that Jenga tower of a web application doesn’t fall apart halfway there.
I believe the most important point here is the internal business politics that allows such an approach in development. Once I was curious and tried to find out how private banks' front ends look, and I was surprised to learn that they used minimal frameworks (sometimes none) and obviously zero external resources.
One thing is clear: if the business structure allows 10MB for a login page, this is not only about the front-end, this could be about all services and could spread much wider.
BTW, the bank that we use (with the 10MB login page) totally sucks in every aspect of business relations as well.
Just yesterday I stumbled upon a developer video from Germany who was trying to build some AI RAG SaaS for small businesses and was completely overwhelmed with the EU Privacy and data protection regulations and was stuttering when was talking about going to jail for using OpenAI API the wrong way.
Just Wow. These things are not for you, nobody is going to jail for their app or paying life ruining fines in Europe as long as they don't actually cause real harm. All those rules and regulations are intended for large companies who abuse their power or harm large parts of the society by ignoring stuff when not making them profit.
Edit: I'm not complaining about the regulations in this comment, I'm saying that it's bad advice to ignore them just because you're a small business unless there is an exception for them. As it happens, exceptions for small business are planned.
The basics are simple enough to run a legit business. There are some obvious and basic data protection requirements but I wouldn't call a gray zone unless pushing for it. Also, there's no EU police checking apps for violations etc. You don't just get sued the moment your app hits the App Store.
It mainly boils down to: write ARIA tags and adhere to WCAG version 2.1 level AA.
There are some parts of GDPR that are non-negotiable however, even for indie hackers. If you collect personally identifiable info, you NEED a privacy policy, a process for users to get their data deleted if they request it, for example.
I'm very interested in how they've implemented Google Analytics. No external JS is loaded, just 9KB of packed JS embedded implementing a minimal call... and then it is being sent to their own script analytics4.php which acts like MITM. Does anyone know the name of the plugin or package they are using?
But for smaller companies, getting the website/app up to the rules for European Accessibility act can be over their limits, cause it's not an easy task, depending on the type of UI your app is using.
So their only option is just to avoid Europen market, if they don't want to go to jail.
And European Software marked will be left behind even more.
Europe has 0 power in online world and they keep it like that by making dumb rules everyday.
> complying to the available laws.
That's why Europe has gotten into its present sorry state when it comes to IT. They're winning all the law-related battles but they've lost the big war, just look of how all of Europe is a slave to the American IT industry (after all, we're having this conversation on a an American-run forum, even though I presume that we're both EU citizens).
Stringent regulations that American companies won't be compliant with without extra effort can be expected to increase the relative competitiveness of European companies in the EU.
There's benefits, but there's a LOT of cons that people refuse to admit, and this is not saying "brexit was better", just that EU politics are riddled with corruption and pretending we're good because we try to compare ourselves to a different context in the USA is just pointless.
If this leads to better accessibility in the common frameworks or the emergence of more accessible frameworks, it will be a win for every Internet user in the world, though. This is a technical issue that can be fixed.
The purpose of this Directive is to contribute to the proper functioning of the internal market by approximating laws, regulations and administrative provisions of the Member States as regards accessibility requirements for certain products and services by, in particular, eliminating and preventing barriers to the free movement of certain accessible products and services arising from divergent accessibility requirements in the Member States. This would increase the availability of accessible products and services in the internal market and improve the accessibility of relevant information.
Due to the differences in national accessibility requirements, individual professionals, SMEs and microenterprises in particular are discouraged from entering into business ventures outside their own domestic markets. The national, or even regional or local, accessibility requirements that Member States have put in place currently differ as regards both coverage and level of detail. Those differences negatively affect competitiveness and growth, due to the additional costs incurred in the development and marketing of accessible products and services for each national market.
The approximation of national measures at Union level is therefore necessary for the proper functioning of the internal market in order to put an end to fragmentation in the market of accessible products and services, to create economies of scale, to facilitate cross-border trade and mobility, as well as to help economic operators to concentrate resources on innovation instead of using those resources to cover expenses arising from fragmented legislation across the Union.
I was once talking with the cto of an Ai law startup who made a presentation in university, and he noted that one of the main issue to move to other countries would have been different laws. Of course for the whole law sector that's impossible to harmonize (at least for the time being), but if for some things there can be harmonization, it's a win win for everything
I think this is reasonable. What you are writing feels less reasonable.
Also we can follow China's leadership and get our own digital wall.
* Banks
* Webshops
* Operating Systems
* Software designed for Communication
The rest is all hardware devices (ATMs n such), public government services (the public transport schedule), relates to TV or isn't software in the first place (ebooks).
Banks and OSes are markets with only a few players and none of them are small. It'll be interesting to see if this on a technical level will demand changes for Wayland, afaik it's story on accessibility is pretty shit still.
Webshops overwhelmingly either use larger third parties as intermediaries (ie. Etsy) or stuff like woocommerce, an off the shelf solution developed by Automattic (who will obviously have to accommodate by updating woocommerce, which they probably will since iirc they offer a commercial solution for woocommerce themselves).
And communication software really is the big one, but most people aren't making new ones of those either. That's gonna be a pain for Slack/Salesforce, Meta, Reddit and so on, but they'll have legal pressure to comply (which opens up a lot more room to accelerate and give money to that sort of thing). If you start out in this market in particular, it'll probably be easy to comply with this regulation "from the ground up", just like how it's pretty easy to not build a data slurper from scratch after the GDPR got passed into law.
The thing they all have in common is that there's relatively few actual competing products.
In Denmark we had a year to make government/public apps fully accessible and the same for websites and documents presented on websites.
We also had to create accessibility certificates and dedicated pages on the websites to prove and clarify the state of the accessibility (or lack of, together with a statement of what's being done to remedy the issues).
Are these "new" EU laws for a different sector (private?) or something else? I can't find any references in the article. I may be blind (pun intended).
And yes, these new laws seems to be aimed for private sector as well.
That seems extremely excessive. A prime example of regulatory overreach.
The reality is that if you're ignoring this stuff, you are effectively eliminating a significant chunk of the population from participating in public life. It's about as bad as not having wheelchair ramps in public places, except the same software runs everywhere, so it's not the one virtual 'building' missing it, but all buildings made by the same architect.
You can impose arbitrarily high financial penalties, or even shut down the business, and that's plenty enough for the incentives to tilt in the correct direction. But prison? How the heck is that necessary for this?
In the EU the directives define a max range. Eg. 10% of global revenue or 20 million EUR whichever is higher.
Then the court figures out to what extend the company broke the law.
This system is needed to make sure that there are not some member states that are more forgiving and provides a competitive edge for companies to move there.
There is a range of fines, and a minor non-repeat infringement will obviously not get you the maximum penalty.
But consider the case where a person cannot book a medical appointment, or ask a refund, or claim insurance. The company will be fined, and if the offense does not get fixed than _at some point_ the responsible person may face jail time.
The judge in that case held that doing so is a privacy violation since the webpage now connects to Google without the users' consent. Total fine? €150. An extremely token amount because the blog owner obviously didn't intend to break the law. Quite the contrast to the million dollar fines you hear about for big tech companies.
Laws are not computer code. They're not run, unthinkingly, by a judge acting as a CPU.
We have humans (like juries) looking to see whether an offence was committed. Are they going to find someone guilty of an offence like this?
Then we have judges who look at the whole facts of a case to determine a sentence[0]. Would they think it proportionate for a first-time offender to be imprisoned for this?
On the other hand, if a large content creator has been repeatedly warned not to break the law and they've ignored those warnings, why shouldn't they be punished?
[0] Yes, some jurisdictions have sentencing guidelines and mandatory minimums.
"providing captions on an OF video" likely will not lead to full non-compliance.
Anywho, to what extend I agree with stuff like this is another conversation. Just don't misrepresent how the legal system works.
> - access to audio-visual media services such as television broadcast and related consumer equipment
But only if your adult website makes more than 2 million EUR in profit.
Need a caption on an image or video? AI will generte it for you! But the quality is a different question. Is the caption correct? Is the caption usefull? In my test with images it was roughly 60/40 on the correctness.
On the other hand. If you force a company to provide those captions. They might use the cheapest provider. If they do a better job is anyones guess.
From an efficiency standpoint it would be way better when devs run this once and not every visitor.
The better option is for the ai to review the code during development and suggest suitable accessibility measures compared to the spec and common guidelines.
I'm not sure I quite understand what you are getting at. If you are company with more then 2 million EUR in profit, and you build a website for Transportation tickets, just add proper HTML tags so screenreads work. That is the gist if it.
And I also don't see anything related to music, the closes I can see is "audio-visual media services such as television broadcast"
What are you on about? This is target against big cooperation, so a blind person can buy a bus ticket online.
But I didn't know about the limits, which would make it okay in my case.
I recall a website pushing pictures into the "license free" section of google images and then suing other websites reusing them for copyright infringement.