[tonis2]

I'm all for making the apps / websites that are essential for disabled people accessible.

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.

[consp]

Don't know what you define as small but when you have two million per year turnover and ten employees you should think about complying to the available laws. Since those are the cutoff numbers where below it does not apply.

[paganel]

A 15-people business is most definitely a small business.

> 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).

[yorwba]

Well-capitalized American consumer software companies have been able to outcompete European competitors by taking a product developed for the US and offering it in the EU market at zero marginal cost. In areas of IT where zero-marginal-cost expansion is not so easy (e.g. industrial control software that comes bundled with the equipment it is controlling) there doesn't seem to be much of an American advantage.

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.

[chrisldgk]

That might be true, but it’s also the reason we don’t have a Zuckerberg or Musk taking charge of EU politics. There’s a balance to be struck here, and I prefer this over being a slave to American big tech.

[isaacremuant]

No. It's von der Meyer and other plutocrats, making every country lose sovereignty in ever expanding ways. We went from better trade and transport to a bureocratic unaccountable beast that eats money at insane speed and becomes more censorious, pro war and power hungry with each year that passes.

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.

[kergonath]

> 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.

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.

[amarcheschi]

The opposite, the directive is posed to harmonize a situation introducing a common ground for the states to legiferate in a similar way, helping companies have less work to do to adapt one product to another state laws, I'm quoting the first points of the directive:

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

[ahofmann]

Smaller companies are exempt from those things. In Germany the rule is less than 10 employees or less than 2 million in sales.

I think this is reasonable. What you are writing feels less reasonable.

[jonathanstrange]

ADA lawsuits in the US are frequent and often somewhat frivolous, and they probably cost way more than European fines, so I don't think the regulation puts the European software market at a disadvantage. I admit it's bad for small companies, though, when they want to or need to use alternative GUI frameworks (usually, for technical or licensing-related reasons). For instance, I was planning to use Fyne with Go for some small apps, but it has zero accessibility support and is therefore out of question.

[hostyle]

The part that you may be missing here is that Europe puts people first. America (in particular, but not exclusively) puts business (or money) first.

[pjmlp]

The thing of the smaller people always comes up when digital regulations are to be, yet on other industries everyone copes, including street vendors, granted in some countries there is a gray zone in following laws, but still they usually come up.

Also we can follow China's leadership and get our own digital wall.

[Mashimo]

> Europe has 0 power in online world

The annoying cookie banners prove you wrong.

[noirscape]

Most smaller companies aren't in the markets this legislation is written for anyway. This primarily places demands on four types of software/digital products (not a lawyer):

* 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.