EAA, Accessibility & WCAG Standards

How does someone with a visual impairment buy a train ticket online?

Think about it. Buying a ticket, booking a hotel room, filling out a form… these are mindlessly simple tasks for most of us. But for someone with a visual impairment, it can be an absolute obstacle course. How do you navigate a website when you can’t see where to click? How do you complete a payment without visual cues?

Here at EPIC, we recently got a reality check. We took part in a training session led by a leading WCAG certification body here in Belgium. Ibrahim, a blind user, came in to share his digital daily life: the tools that keep him connected, the frustrating roadblocks he hits every single day, and the best practices that actually change the game.

It smacked us in the face with an obvious truth: a website can be drop-dead gorgeous and hyper-performant, but it’s only truly successful if everyone can use it.

Welcome to the world of digital accessibility!

Why should your brand care about WCAG right now?

Let’s start with the stick: digital accessibility is no longer just a “nice-to-have” or a bullet point on a CSR report. As of June 2025, the European Accessibility Act (EAA) made it a legal obligation for a massive chunk of economic players. The WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) are the international gold standard rules that make a site usable for everyone.

Now for the carrot: beyond the legal threats, this is about your brand identity. Even if you aren’t legally forced to get a certificate, what kind of message are you sending if your digital experience shuts out part of your audience? Making sure every single touchpoint is optimized for everyone isn’t just good legal hygiene, it’s good taste.

Breaking down the WCAG (Without the headache)

The WCAG (versions 2.0, 2.1, 2.2) are basically the rulebook for making web content accessible to people with disabilities. The latest iteration (2.2) is fully backwards-compatible. Treat it like software updates: if you build for 2.2, you automatically tick all the boxes for the older versions.

The W3C (the internet’s governing wizards) built these rules around four core pillars :

1. Perceivable : Users must be able to process the information. If you have an image, it needs alt-text for screen readers. If you have a video, it needs subtitles. Simple.
2. Operable : Can someone navigate your site using only a keyboard? Because if they can’t, your slick UI just became a brick wall.
3. Understandable : Your copy shouldn’t require a PhD to read, and your error messages should actually explain what went wrong (looking at you, “Error 403: Something went wrong”).
4. Robust : Your code needs to play nice with assistive tech, like screen readers or voice software, now and ib the future as the web keeps evolving.

To measure success, these principles are split into three levels of compliance:

• Level A: The bare minimum. The digital equivalent of adding a ramp to a building.
• Level AA: The sweet spot. This is what the legislation actually demands, covering the vast majority of user needs.
• Level AAA: The holy grail. Elite-level accessibility, though sometimes tricky to hit for every single piece of content without breaking your design’s soul.

In general, the higher the compliance level you target, the tighter the technical and creative constraints become. But as any good designer will tell you: constraints breed great creativity.

In practice, checking your compliance comes down to self-assessment or an external audit. Here in Belgium, official certification bodies can run these deep-dives and hand over an official label, giving your brand a serious stamp of trust and credibility.

Accessibility is a team sport

Spoiler alert: hitting Level AA compliance isn’t just on the agency building your site. A massive chunk of the work happens in the daily grind of your own content teams.

An agency can build a flawless, accessible machine, but you have to drive it properly. That means:

• Writing actual meta-descriptions and alt-text for every single new image.
• Structuring your articles with logical headings (H2, H3, H4) instead of just picking fonts because they look pretty.
• Keeping a sharp eye on color contrast when adding new graphic elements.
• Providing accessible formats like subtitles for new videos.

We build the solid technical foundation; you keep it alive and compliant through your content. Teamwork makes the dream work.

How EPIC has your back

Over the years, we’ve baked accessibility deep into our design and development DNA. We didn’t do it just to please the regulators; we did it to build better products.

Planning a website redesign?

Whatever your accessibility goals, we weave standard best practices (semantic structure, keyboard navigation, precise visual contrast) right into our process from day one. You’ll get a site that naturally flirts with Level A or AA compliance.

Want to go all the way and get an official certification? We’ll loop in an accredited WCAG auditor right at the kickoff to guide us through the labeling process—adding a serious stamp of trust and credibility to your brand.

Keeping your current site but want to clean up your act?

We can run a deep-dive audit, mixing automated scanning tools with good old-fashioned manual testing, to pinpoint exactly where your site is failing your users.

From there, we’ll co-create a pragmatic roadmap: quick wins you can fix by next Tuesday (alt-tags, basic contrast fixes, metadata) and a long-term strategy to get you up to code.