Accessibility, SustyWeb, SDGs, and upcoming European Legislation in 2024/2025 🇪🇺⚖️

Disclaimer: I am no lawyer, so this is no legal advice!

As a web developer with a focus on web performance and an open mind for our impact on society, I have been wondering why so many devs and designers didn't seem to care much about accessibility and sustainability so far. But that will change a lot due to upcoming legislation in 2024 and 2025.

Compliance and customers: beyond the money 💶

Professional work is all about the money. Is it? While that's not 100% true, as there are non-profit organisations and Gen-Z employees are said to care more about ethical values, family and well-being than older generations, money is still one of the most important levers in the economy.

If you want to make a change and make team leaders and project managers care more about something, it's a reasonable strategy to argue about profits and customers. Customers care about money, too, but they also care about comfort, style, and reputation, among many other possible values. Younger customers in rich countries care increasingly more about ethics, ecology, and SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals – at least if it doesn't take too much effort).

Customers are even getting suspicious about greenwashing, so companies will risk so-called shitstorms and losing profits and reputation if they don't show some serious effort towards sustainability.

But there is another, even more important leverage: law!

The main reason for the prevailing ugly cookie banners on European websites is the GDPR, a Verschlimmbesserung inspired by campaigns for better privacy. The main reason for WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) and accessibility tools has been US American legislation. However, due to international trade and globalization, even US sites like the Washington Post have reacted to European cookie laws, while Meta got fined $1.3 billion for breaking E.U. GDPR privacy rules. So, making laws can impact beyond its official regional scope of application.

Two important new laws will change European business soon: The German Supply Chain Due Diligence Act (Lieferkettengesetz) and the extended mandatory website accessibility required in The European Accessibility Act (EAA).

Accessibility Reform – European Accessibility Act 2025

The European Accessibility Act (EAA) will require most digital products to embrace accessibility, conforming to WCAG 2.1 level AA. The European accessibility act covers products and services that have been identified as being most important for persons with disabilities.

As designers and developers, we still have time to go ahead and explore how to comply with the upcoming requirements in a beautiful, creative and user-friendly fashion.

Shape and design before lawyers will ⚖️🔨

If we don't, we will be pushed by lawyers and bureaucrats. They might create another horrible Verschlimmbesserung layer around our products instead of helping to shape them according to the needs that the laws tried to strengthen in the first place.

I hope it will not be another cookie-banner disaster, though, as WCAG is already there, and more and more designers and developers use it as a minimal standard while making their websites more accessible and usable.

But like the European Privacy legislation, there is a lot more to come that has the potential to initiate a fundamental change in the first world economy.

Supply Chain Due Diligence Act – Lieferkettengesetz 2023/2024

Already effective for large companies, Germany's Supply Chain Due Diligence Act will become mandatory for many more businesses in 2024.

It requires greater transparency about where products, ingredients and raw materials come from and what happens before a product hits the market. While most changes will not directly affect web design, there is much additional information that needs to be displayed, especially on e-commerce shopping sites. How can we do this in an understandable, unobtrusive and helpful way?

Ecological brands have already done this for years, so if you have worked with this kind of customer, you already know. Many brands didn't care much in the past, but they will soon have to! Here is an example from one of my customers' shops showing where the money goes to:

Green Hosting and Web Performance Legislation?

I don't know of any plans for more upcoming legislation concerning the ecology and sustainability of websites. But it seems clear in which direction we must be heading.

As I said before, let's not wait for bureaucratic compliance catastrophes, but let's be the vanguard of improving energy efficiency and accessibility beautifully and helping the web evolve in a positive direction, amending and fixing all that went wrong somewhere between 1993 and 2023.

Web Performance beyond Speed and Web Vitals: WCAG, Sustyweb, Green Hosting, Carbon Equivalents, ...

Like auditing WCAG compliance with accessibility tools like axe and WAVE, it has become much easier to measure and provide data about the ecological impact of web development, but there are still a lot of unknown figures.

Webpagetest, Ecograder, and Website Carbon are useful services to help us quickly audit and verify that the websites that we produce meet some important non-functional standards beyond the explicit requirements and graphic designs.

Lighthouse used to focus on web speed (often subsumed under the ambiguous umbrella term "web performance") and added usability, accessibility and some SEO best practices with Google's 2021 Web Vitals update. WebPageTest goes one step further by offering to include carbon control.

More and more useful tools have been added everywhere to measure and improve aspects that most didn't care much about yet. We only have to use them!

Accessibility: what's the "wick egg"? 🐥🥚

Besides the color contrast calculation included in Chrome and Firefox developer tools, there are some handy audition tools to get more specific insights directly in your browser, like axe and WAVE to help us comply with WCAG 2.0 recommendations.

Only recently, I learned that we can pronounce WCAG as "wick egg", so it sounds more cute and less technical. Luckily, the upcoming ecological recommendation also comes with a cute nickname.

Enter Sustyweb 👣

When the Website Carbon tool came out, people used to talk about "ecological footprints", which has been criticized as an unhelpful term originally coined by the fossil fuels industry to shift focus away from corporate actors and lay another burden on the back of common people.

I love that the link to the new Web Sustainability Guidelines (WSG) 1.0 says "sustyweb" so it comes with a cute nickname alternative to "W.S.G." already.

Web Sustainability Guidelines (WSG) 1.0 covers a wide range of recommendations for making websites and products more sustainable. Found at

https://w3c.github.io/sustyweb/

this unofficial community draft states that

following these guidelines which utilize environment, social, and governance (ESG) principles throughout the decision-making processes, you can minimize your environmental impact through a mixture of user-centered design, performant web development, renewable infrastructure, sustainable business strategy, and (with metrics) various combinations of those mentioned.

Measuring Sustyweb and Ecologic Impact ⏱️

How to measure sustyweb? Some simple tools are already there:

• [x] Ecograder
• [x] Website Carbon
• [x] Greener Software

But especially green hosting still causes controversy.

Greenwashing Dilemma 🟩💦

Many hosters, including global cloud services, have gotten their services on a "hosted green" list, although they burn fossil fuels to power some of their data centers at least at certain times of day.

The green software foundation has a long list containing millions of "green hosting" services, based on the use of (mostly?) renewable energy: the green web dataset

But like so often in information technology, it can be hard to give the right answer about one general best practice. It depends: if you only have customers in a certain region, e.g. an online shop that only delivers locally or in a specific country, they probably don't need a global content delivery network (CDN), and it might even be more energy efficient to use a local web hosting service that uses local greenwashing electricity from mixed sources than to host at a 100% thermic water powered data center in Iceland that would result in every data request taking an extra round trip around half the globe or getting served from a local proxy server that never appears in your synthetic measurements.

Greenwashing or small steps in the right direction?

Greenwashing controversy part two: I think that sometimes greenwashing can be better than not caring about the environment at all. At least there is some change going on, and the green(washing) labels make the topic more visible and start a discussion. On the other hand, if you run an audit and see "your website is hosted green" and it "consumes less carbon than average", you might think your work is done when it isn't.

Constructive criticism and further improvements

While my personal portfolio website got good scores in Website Carbon, Ecograder and Greener Software audits, Cleaner Web found out that I hadn't been really hosting as green as I should, and that there were some images missing out of optimization.

I will take the critical findings seriously in my upcoming website updates.

I also wrote a related, but less technical, blog post in German: Nachhaltig elegantes Webdesign 2024/2025.

So stay tuned and add your own experience and suggestions in the comments!