✅ Your product finders are now fully accessible and EAA compliant

This release is not just about legal compliance. It’s a huge leap forward in ensuring that all users, regardless of ability, have an inclusive and seamless experience on your website. From improved keyboard navigation to screen reader compatibility and enhanced visual contrast, we've made sure to comply with all relevant WCAG 2.2 guidelines.

You don’t have to take our word for it! We had our application tested by specialists to make sure we did it right. Here’s a quote from their report that we’re really proud of:

This site (Aiden apps) now meets all the required technical (WCAG2.2) success criteria for digital accessibility, ensuring a fully inclusive experience for all users, regardless of their abilities or the assistive technologies they use.

Want to dive into all the details? Shoot us a message and we’ll send you the full 59-page PDF report.

Read on to find out what this means for you — there’s a small to do list at the end.

👨‍💻 What’s changed, exactly?

We’ve made a number of technical and UX improvements to ensure your apps are accessible:

• Full support for screen readers and keyboard-only navigation
• All interaction elements and content are now semantically structured and labeled correctly
• A new option to add alt text to images and videos directly in the Conversation builder
• Improved contrast and visual cues in layout (check out the updated progress bar!)

🇪🇺 What is the European Accessibility Act (EAA)?

We hope you’re all already aware of this, but for those whore aren’t, in short:

From 17 June onwards, most online stores must comply with the European Accessibility Act (EAA). This means your website must be accessible for everyone, regardless of ability. This can be achieved by making sure your store follows the so-called WCAG guidelines.

So, that’s what we did!

⌨️ Navigation with screen readers and keyboards

People who have a visual impairment use tools like screen readers to understand and navigate through your website. To do this properly, you need to give these tools structured content to work with.

That's why all of our question types, buttons and every other navigation element of your Aiden apps is now properly set up to use with a screen reader. We also made sure your apps are now fully operable with just a keyboard, so people who cannot use a mouse can also find the right product.

Screen readers also explain image and video content to their users. They do this by reading out the ‘alt text’ of the image or video. Such short, descriptive sentences can now be set in Conversation in Aiden. Good to know: These captions are not visible in the app, they’re only accessible for screen readers.

👓 Contrast, readability and easy language

To make sure your guided selling apps are easy to understand for everyone, we’ve also made several layout improvements, such as a visual indicator on the progress bar.

Color contrast is equally important, for example for people who are color blind. In the Look & Feel section, Aiden now helps you make the right decisions to ensure accurate contrast levels. We highly recommend that you have look at your style templates to check if your color choices pass the contrast requirements.

The final, important point that is also related to accessibility is using language that is easy to understand. This has always been one of our best practices, so consider this a reminder to use language that’s A2 or B1 level.

✅ Your to do list

There are 3 things that you need to check and set up yourself, so we've created a small to do list for you. We’ve made them as easy as possible:

1. Make sure the color contrast throughout your product finder is high enough. You can easily check this in your style template in the Look & Feel section.
2. Images and videos need a clear description ('alt text'), so screen readers can read and explain this content to users. You can now set these descriptions in Conversation.
3. Use A2 or B1 language level to make sure everyone is able to understand your questions. If you're using Aiden AI, this is already taken care of!

Let's make great advice accessible for everyone!