What is WCAG and the European Accessibility Act?
To boil it down: The European Accessibility Act (EAA) is a set of common EU rules made to improve the accessibility of key products and services for people with disabilities.
To support this, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) provide standards that accommodate people with blindness or low vision, deafness or hearing loss, limited movement, speech disabilities, photosensitivity and combinations of these conditions.
Think of it like this:
European Accessibility Act = Legal framework (what you’re required to do)
WCAG = Technical standard (How you meet those requirements)
How can I ensure that my feedback forms are EAA compliant?
With Mopinion, it’s as easy as flipping a toggle!
As a European company, we prioritise helping our customers meet EU guidelines. However, web accessibility has always mattered to us, which is why WCAG options have been built into our digital feedback solution for years.
To create a WCAG-compliant feedback form, simply toggle the accessibility option in the Design tab of our form creator. Mopinion will automatically apply the correct settings and offer the appropriate design options.
Voilà! Your form will now, among other things, support screen readers and be fully keyboard navigable.
What does a feedback form need to adhere to the WCAG guidelines?
The WCAG consists of twelve guidelines, organised into four principles: perceivable, operable, understandable and robust.
This is what it means:
- Perceivable: All users must be able to perceive your content. In practice, this means that websites and apps must, for example, support screen readers (including for non-text content like images and videos), ensure sufficient colour contrast and provide responsive layouts.
- Operable: User interface (UI) and navigation must be operable for all users. Among other things, your content must be navigable with a keyboard, provide enough time for users to interact, not be at risk for triggering seizures and have clear indicators that show which element on a webpage is in focus (focus indicators).
- Understandable: Text content has to be readable and easy to understand.
- Robust: Content is compatible with current and future assistive technology, like braille terminals, screen readers and speech recognition.
By using Mopinion’s feedback forms, you also ensure that the surveys you are showing to your users has been fully tested with NVDA – the most used screen reader.
How are Mopinion feedback forms accessible?
Mopinion offers a range of options to ensure that your feedback experiences are WCAG compliant. By activating a toggle from the design settings, a focus indicator is added, highlighting buttons and elements as the user navigates the feedback form.
The toggle also enables screen readers to read your forms aloud correctly, makes it possible to use a keyboard to navigate forms, includes alt tags for images, and more.
All the element colours in the form builder are adjustable, so you can still create forms that match your company’s look and feel – only now they’ll also be accessible to all users!