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Accessibility Industry Update: July 2026

Home » Newsletters » Accessibility Industry Update: July 2026

From the Desk of the Editor

It’s been a very busy time in the accessibility world. This larger-than-average edition is full of thought-provoking reads, product updates, and legal changes. We mark the European Accessibility Act’s first enforcement anniversary by looking at what has changed in practice, plus assistive technology announcements following Global Accessibility Awareness Day, and finally review the thoughts of commenters on the DOJ’s Title II extension now that the deadline has passed.

Standing Notes

If you are new here, welcome. We compile this update every month to keep you informed on the changing landscape of digital accessibility. Whether you are a developer, product manager, QA specialist, leader, or somewhere in between, we want to give you the context you need to stay in the know.

As always, reach out if you think we missed something, or share the link with your colleagues or partners who may benefit from some or all of this information. You can also sign up to receive these accessibility updates via email.

– The QualityLogic Editorial Team

What’s Inside

Upcoming Conferences and Events

WebAIM Screen Reader User Survey #11 is Open

The eleventh annual Screen Reader User Survey from WebAIM is open for responses through August 31. It will only take a couple of minutes, and by filling it out you get the opportunity to influence the data that organizations rely on to make decisions on what they use to test.

For well over a decade, WebAIM has collected and published screen reader usage data that accessibility teams, standards and advocacy groups, tool makers, researchers, and testers have come to rely on to build products and make decisions. The survey is open to all screen reader users, including people who use screen readers for evaluation and testing, and WebAIM expects to publish aggregated results in September. Of course, we will cover those in this newsletter when they do come out.

Reflections on One Year of the European Accessibility Act: How’s It Going?

The European Accessibility Act (EAA) reached its first enforcement anniversary on June 28. After years of buildup, the obligation is now in force across the EU.

A wide range of consumer-facing digital products and services, from banking apps and ecommerce to ebooks, ticketing machines, and ATMs, have been expected to meet EN 301 549 (the EU’s accessibility standard based around the WCAG) for the past year. This legislation was critical in part because it applied to anyone doing business inside any EU member state.

Companies spent heavily to prepare, and many accessibility teams spent the past year turning policy language into audits, remediation plans, vendor pleas, and conformance documentation.

Unfortunately, the user experience has not moved nearly as much as the policy work around it.

New research from Vision Ireland, reported by Irish Tech News, has an unflattering answer about the latter. In a survey of blind and visually impaired users, only about 3% reported a noticeable improvement in website and digital accessibility, while 43% saw no improvement at all. Nearly one in three did not know the law existed.

How Did Brands Do?

Ireland recorded only 56 complaints in the first year, most of them to the consumer protection authority.

Bogdan Cerovac published a separate first-year EAA review focused on e-commerce. He checked 106 major online commerce homepages across 27 EU countries, using a combination of automated tests and quick manual checks for skip links, valid alternative text descriptions, and validation errors. Every homepage had accessibility issues in both automated and manual checks. Accessibility statements were also few and far between: only 21 of the 106 sites had an accessibility page or statement that was easy to find, and he found no such page on sampled homepages in 13 countries. Among the statements he did find, some avoided conformance claims, some did not name a standard, and only a handful referred to EN 301 549.

These results paint a sobering picture that many practitioners have been stressing for years, which is that a regulation can drive procurement reviews, accessibility statements, and remediation tickets without making the resulting service easier to use for the people it was meant to serve. We have taken to calling this “performative accessibility,” which is to say progress on paper that fails to match up to the reality of the user experience.

If legal action is not forthcoming, the incentives will begin to wane in favor of other priorities.

Research from Deque provides some hope for the continued priority of accessibility, though. In a look at early signs of EAA enforcement across Europe, they found that a more active regulatory landscape is indeed forming. The Dutch regulator (ACM) has been auditing companies that failed to publish accessibility statements. French disability groups filed interim-relief actions against four major grocery retailers. Sweden opened its first e-commerce cases. A Norwegian medical-app provider faced compulsory daily fines reported at roughly $5,360 per day until it complied.

Even if the paperwork has moved faster than the lived experience of users, it really only takes a couple big headlines to push brands into action. 

Our Thoughts

It is too early to call the EAA toothless and ineffective. Accessibility law usually matures through enforcement practice, regulator guidance, complaints, private actions, and a long series of very specific disputes. In the United States, the ADA took years to develop sustained digital-accessibility pressure, and courts are shaping that terrain to this day (see our legal updates columns). European regulators are now building the same institutional muscle. Anyone who knows the EU knows that the EU is good at regulation, and while the EAA is not upheld primarily through private action (as is the case in the US), individuals are still able to file formal complaints with national Market Surveillance Authorities. Advocates are likely to continue spreading awareness of these pathways as time goes on.

GAAD 2026: Assistive Tech Got Ambitious

Global Accessibility Awareness Day fell on May 21. In typical fashion, hundreds of webinars and in-person events were held to spread awareness and commemorate 14 years of advocacy. Tech companies often take the opportunity to talk about what they are doing and what is coming to their products in the months ahead.

Apple previewed the ability to drive a compatible power wheelchair using Apple Vision Pro, relying on the headset’s eye tracking to let users move in eight directions and pause or stop with their eyes alone. The feature launches with support for the Tolt and LUCI alternative drive systems in the US. Apple also highlighted the ability to ask questions about one’s surroundings and perform magnification with a simple press of the action button. The Hikawa Adaptive MagSafe stand was made available in Apple Stores, which helps people with disabilities affecting grip, strength, and mobility hold their iPhone in different ways. And finally, for anyone who uses the Apple TV, larger text sizes are coming to tvOS.

  • Sony joined in with the launch of the PlayStation Studios Accessibility Community Council, a standing group of 15 consultants with lived experience of disability who feed into game development through play sessions and design workshops. Sony says the council already shaped the fall-protection system in the game SAROS.
  • Netflix used the day to announce a Search by Language feature that lets you find titles by language and accessibility format right from the search bar and reported adding more than 13,000 hours of audio description across 34 languages in 2025. American Sign Language support is on the roadmap.
  • Evinced, a provider of automated accessibility solutions, announced the launch of Evinced 500, which is an assessment of the accessibility of the websites of the largest 500 enterprises in the US (the Fortune 500). They found an average of 20 issues per homepage. While this might sound like a lot, it is far fewer than the 56 cited by the most recent WebAIM Million.
  • GitHub used GAAD to publish the next chapter in its accessibility strategy, with work that reaches beyond GitHub’s own UI. The company is putting effort into open-source accessibility at scale, including an Open Source Assistive Technology Hackathon, an Open Source Accessibility Summit, accessibility best practices for maintainers, and continued platform work such as the redesigned pull request experience, enhanced contrast controls, semantic issue search, and CLI improvements.

In the US, the fight over delayed federal deadlines has moved into court. As we have covered, the DOJ pushed its ADA Title II web rule compliance dates back by a year, and HHS did the same for the Section 504 healthcare requirements. The National Federation of the Blind, represented by Democracy Forward, filed suit over those delays, arguing that the extensions deny disabled people access to essential government and healthcare services. Separately, seven states are backing a case that disability advocates warn could weaken longstanding community-integration protections. For public-sector and healthcare teams, the extended deadlines remain in place while the challenge proceeds, and the underlying obligation to provide accessible services never went away. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, building for WCAG 2.1 AA or above remains the sensible plan.

On the employment side, the Eighth Circuit revived a nurse’s ADA accommodation suit in Klimek v. CentraCare Health System. The court reversed summary judgment for the employer and rejected the argument that complying with the employer’s vaccine policy was itself an “essential job function.” Employers still have to identify the job function at issue and engage with the requested accommodation. This one has more to do with Title I employment law than accessibility, but any team handling internal ADA requests may want to take note.

As for the broader litigation trend, Seyfarth’s tracker reported 3,117 federal website accessibility lawsuits in 2025, up 27 percent from the prior year and now more than a third of all ADA Title III federal filings, concentrated heavily in New York, Florida, and Illinois. After a couple of softer years, web-accessibility litigation is climbing again, with new plaintiff firms and AI-assisted filings driving some of the volume.

In Converge Accessibility’s June 2026 legal update, the legislative response continues to revolve around standards bills, administrative-exhaustion proposals, state cure programs, and state penalties for abusive filing practices.

At the federal level, the “Online Accessibility Act” (H.R. 9539) was reintroduced, which would amend the ADA to cover consumer-facing websites and mobile apps operated by private entities. The bill now sits alongside H.R. 3417, which focuses on establishing a standard, and H.R. 7328, which would add administrative steps before some small-business website accessibility suits could proceed. In California, AB 2190, which would have limited Unruh Act web accessibility lawsuits and delayed a WCAG 2.2 standard to 2028, has stalled. AB 649 would create a small-business cure program and require attorneys to report website accessibility complaints and outcomes to the California Commission on Disability Access.

Several states continue to target abusive accessibility litigation. (Abusive accessibility litigation happens when lawyers and “serial plaintiffs” use disability laws to extort money from businesses.) Georgia HB 1470, effective July 1, creates a cause of action against people who file abusive web-accessibility lawsuits. Utah SB 68 is already in force and lets the state attorney general, or an affected resident, sue over abusive web-accessibility litigation after a 90-day cure period. Missouri HB 1674, effective August 28, lets the state attorney general seek damages from attorneys who engage in abusive web-accessibility litigation. These laws regulate demand-letter and lawsuit practices around inaccessible websites, separate from the underlying duty to make the websites accessible. 

What We’ve Been Reading

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Thanks for Reading!

That’s a wrap for this month.