Interview
Access all areas ?
THEO REILLY TALKS TO STEPHEN CUTCHINS , SENIOR MANAGER ACCESSIBILITY AT CVENT , AND FOCUSES ON THE LIKELY IMPACT FOR EVENT BUSINESSES OF THE EUROPEAN ACCESSIBILITY ACT
T he European Accessibility Act is clearly of importance to the European meetings industry . Could you explain the main points of it ? What it means is that electronic content ( like websites , mobile apps , kiosks , ticketing systems ) has to be accessible to people with disabilities . It ’ s broken down into two dates . The first is 28 June 2025 , which applies to new products and content . So , if you launch a new product on 29 June 2025 , that product has to be accessible . If you add content to an existing site , that new content has to be accessible .
The second date is 28 June 2030 . That ’ s the date for anything that ’ s not new . If you have an existing website or product , it has to be made accessible by June 2030 .
How is this going to be monitored ? Do you trust that companies that don ’ t adhere to this will be adequately policed by public bodies ? I do hope so . I ’ m based in the United States and here we have the Americans with Disabilities Act . But to make big changes , we ’ ve had to go through the legal system .
The numbers are pretty staggering ;. 27 % of the EU population has disability . We ’ re talking over 100 million people .
So , I really hope that public bodies get on board with this and we don ’ t end
Below : Cvent ’ s senior manager acccessibility , Stephen Cutchins up having to do what often happens in the US , where it plays its way through the courts . That ’ s not the best way to go .
Do you think that the penalties are fair ? Some of them are pretty severe . The largest I ’ ve seen is up to € 1,000,000 . For these situations we have a VPAT . It stands for Voluntary Product Accessibility Template . If a company willingly falsifies a VPAT and sells a non-accessible product in an EU market , it ’ s up to 18 months in jail .
I ’ ve seen that happen in Ireland – a jail term of up to 18 months . If you willingly show that you don ’ t care about accessibility , that ’ s discrimination . We ’ re starting to realise that ; it ’ s essentially an anti-discrimination law .
What about those companies that don ’ t know about this act coming into place ? Companies that might fail to comply out of ignorance rather than genuine discrimination ? I ’ m not based in the European Union , but I hope they ’ re in periodicals or conferences . I hope they ’ re letting businesses know that they have to get on board .
The software companies should be letting the businesses that buy their products know that this is coming . It could , in theory , shut a business down if they do everything online , and they ’ re not on board by next year .
To what extent do you think that AI virtual assistants are the way forward for accessibility ? Yes and no . Let ’ s say I ’ m fully blind . I might use a device called a screen reader to read the content out to me . That website has to be natively accessible to be able to talk to the screen reader .
A lot of the work we do here at Cvent is to make sure our products talk to
34 / CONFERENCE & MEETINGS WORLD / ISSUE 132