Brussels, 02/05/2016 (Agence Europe) - On Tuesday evening 3 May, the European Parliament and Dutch Presidency of the Council of the EU, are expected to reach an agreement on the draft directive on web access.
This draft directive seeks to facilitate access to all users, particularly those with special needs or disabilities, to public sector websites and applications. There are currently 761,000 websites of this kind in the EU. Nonetheless, they do not all respect accessibility principles.
The European Commission in December 2013 therefore decided to draw up technical provisions for 12 website categories providing essential information and services to the public. These involve, for example, job search and university subscription services. During the inter-institutional negotiations, the Parliament and Council decided to extend the new rules to be applied to all public sector websites and mobile applications.
The final text, however, is expected to introduce a range of derogations: certain services (such as public service radio broadcasting websites) or content (PDF or Microsoft Office .doc file formats and the reproduction of heritage related collections) would not be obliged to respect access standards. The draft agreement would also contain, at the request of the Council, provisions enabling member states to introduce exceptions to the accessibility principle if they believe that it will incur excessive financial or administrative charges. In an effort to avoid these abuses, each service benefiting from a derogation will have to clearly indicate why some of its content is not accessible.
The future directive is also expected to enable citizens to introduce a request if they wish to access a specific on-demand system function. It is also expected to include a follow-up mechanism that will enable users who have received a negative response to the requests and feel wronged to submit a complaint to an intermediary.
The scope, together with the transposition timeframe, will be at the centre of Tuesday's discussions. Parliament is expected to attempt to limit the derogations and keep the transposition deadlines to a maximum of two years. It is also expected, as always, to attempt to obtain a maximum of delegated acts (by way of opposing the implementing acts on which it has less control). The Council is expected to attempt to emphasise the sacrosanct proportionality principle. It will also be fighting to ensure that the questions of obligations on public and private radio broadcasters are tackled in the revision of the directive on audiovisual media services (AVMS). The end of the meeting is planned for 11pm. (Original version in French by Sophie Petitjean)