Public Procurement Guidance for Accessibility

Procurement is key to succeed in accessibility. Our colleague, Peter Kemeny is leading the ACCICT expert team working on a guidance for procurement authorities that helps them consider accessibility in public procurement.

European legislation is advancing with the accessibility of products, services, websites, mobile apps and other communication services. Additionally, European Standards set accessibility requirements that help complying with those laws.

But the work doesn’t stop there. The European Standardisation Organisations CEN/CENELEC and ETSI also work on creating guidelines that support the application of the accessibility laws and standards. One important way of doing that is to help with accessibility in public procurement.

Procuring accessible products and services, on the one hand, ensures that accessibility is thought of from the beginning and that the organisation buys already accessible products/services, minimising the need to spend extra time and money on it. On the other, it also improves the offer on the market, because companies will need to start making their offer more accessible (and ideally, to infuse accessibility in their development processes from the beginning) in order to be able to compete.

Requirements are increasing

Since 2017, public sector in the EU needs to take accessibility into account when procuring products and services aimed to be used by persons. With the application of the European Accessibility Act, the technical specifications must follow the accessibility requirements set in the law.

Mandate 587 covers the review of existing, and the development of new standards to act as presumed conformance to support the European Accessibility Act. In addition, a technical report containing guidance for procurement authorities that plan to buy ICT products and services is being updated.

Peter Kemeny is leading the expert team of the so called ACCICT project, revising existing reports to align them with the current Public Procurement Directives, the Web Accessibility Directive and the European Accessibility Act, as well as with the ongoing revisions of relevant European Accessibility Standards. The guidance is planned to be published by mid-2026.

If you are working in procurement and interested in this work, please do reach out! The CEN/CENELEC working group plans to run workshops in early 2025, to ensure the content is validated with the intended target audience.