Software as a Service - a new Paradigm in Accessibility
This article discusses a profound transformation—perhaps the biggest upheaval we've seen in digital accessibility so far. No, I'm not talking about artificial intelligence. AI is an important topic, but it's been discussed extensively, and there's little new information on it recently. Instead, I'm talking about Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions that are disruptively revolutionizing accessibility.
From Service to Software
Until now, the market has been divided into three main players:
- Freelancers: They focused on consulting, testing, and training.
- Small agencies: They mostly built websites for smaller municipalities. These specialized teams are often small (10 to 20 people). In addition to development, they usually also handled the hosting and maintenance of the content management system (CMS).
- Large providers: IT companies like adesso or Pixelpark managed the large-scale projects, hosted huge systems, and offered everything from a single source.
These were primarily services; software as a product played a subordinate role. This traditional division is changing. The demands placed on municipal websites are increasing dramatically. Previously, a digital storefront, a contact form, and a social media feed were sufficient. Today, websites are highly complex platforms with deep connections to the digital infrastructure.
This technical depth and the strict legal requirements demand specialized knowledge. Small agencies with just a few designers and developers can no longer provide this level of expertise. Municipalities are therefore increasingly seeking the security of medium-sized or large agencies. There, compliance is guaranteed, and the risk of staff shortages is lower.
The market for smaller websites belonging to private individuals or micro-enterprises is also changing drastically. Individually programmed websites are becoming extinct. This has two reasons:
- Website Generators: Today, simple websites can be created and customized via a prompt. "Produce me a website for a tradesman in Bonn." Even your cousin could do it and get a usable result.
- Modular Systems (like Wix): Customers don't want to deal with the technology of WordPress or Joomla. They're looking for ready-made systems that are easy to use. Website builders offer security, automatic updates, good designs, and don't require any hosting knowledge. HTML and CSS are no longer a problem for laypeople anyway.
What does this mean for accessibility professionals? The technical implementation—that is, design, UX, development, and legal compliance—is increasingly being outsourced to specialized large agencies.
Accessibility experts are therefore shifting their focus more and more towards consulting. They no longer just advise on purely technical accessibility but optimize processes within organizations. The goal: Accessibility should not be a one-off project but should be permanently embedded in the system.
What does this mean for accessibility professionals? The core problem here is primarily service providers with limited accessibility expertise and those offering dumping prices. Competition has become significantly fiercer. As long as the quality of many new players is so poor, and there are monitoring bodies that eventually identify this, I'm more concerned about the providers and their disabled customers than about us running out of work.
The Core of the Transformation: Automation and Monitoring
The real core of this transformation lies in the increasing automation of accessibility. New laws such as the Accessibility Strengthening Act (BFSG) and the Accessible Information Technology Ordinance (BITV) are placing more and more large organizations under obligation. These include federal and state authorities, health insurance companies, large e-commerce companies, and banks.
These organizations often manage thousands or tens of thousands of websites. It is simply impossible to make and keep all of them accessible manually. At the same time, they have relatively large IT budgets.
This is where automated monitoring tools come into play. They continuously check entire websites and PDFs for accessibility and compile the results in an index. This index increases when errors are fixed. A major advantage: Many of these tools can be directly integrated with ticketing systems like Jira. This ensures that errors are automatically forwarded to the responsible developers. Although these tools have existed for some time, they are only now becoming widely adopted. This is primarily due to two reasons:
Accessibility is finally being recognized as a compliance factor that is no longer addressed only on a project-by-project basis.
The acquisition of financially strong stakeholders is increasing dramatically.
These software solutions are currently establishing themselves in the EU, particularly among financially powerful institutions. For corporations and government agencies, it is often significantly easier to justify five-figure monthly budgets for software licenses than budgets for external services.
With the North American market largely saturated, major US product houses are discovering Europe as a "blank spot" on the map. Many industry giants are now trying to make the leap across the Atlantic:- Level Access: Known, among other things, through the purchase of the overlay provider UserWay - presumably to integrate their monitoring technology.
- deque: The market leader in automated testing. Almost everyone in the industry knows their open source engine axe-core, which is found in countless tools.
- Perhaps also other providers such as TPGI
So far, the market for accessibility SaaS in Europe is manageable. There are established forces, but little competition:
- Siteimprove: The Danish company has been active globally for over ten years. With a broad suite for quality assurance, SEO and data protection, it is firmly anchored in the German market.
- Accessibility Cloud: A provider from Sweden (known from my interview with Oliver from Districo) that focuses purely on accessibility and offers a very budget-friendly monitoring solution.
- CAAT from Germany, see also my conversation with Stefan
Although Deque and Level Access are financially strong, the European market will not be a sure-fire success. You face two major hurdles:
- Language and localization: German authorities or corporations do not buy purely English or poorly translated user interfaces. The tools must be perfectly localized. Adapting to local characteristics is not trivial and is more worthwhile for large or financially strong states.
- GDPR and data protection: Even when it comes to publicly accessible websites, European data protection laws are strict. In addition, there are deep reservations about US software providers in the EU, especially in countries like France. Data flows and storage locations must be absolutely legally secure.
The US giants are not lacking in capital. To overcome the hurdles, they will probably set up their own national offices for sales and localization and build up local teams of experts. Another route is through partnerships: you will seek strategic alliances with established IT service providers in the respective countries in order to understand and conquer the market. Since there are hardly any comparable product houses in Europe, the chances are pretty good.
The advantage of Software as a Service (SaaS). The business model can be scaled almost unlimitedly. Whether a software serves 1,000, 10,000 or 100,000 customers makes little technical difference. All you need is a few additional servers and minimally more technical staff and support. Sales are increasing rapidly while costs remain flat. Things are different with classic services: If you want to offer more advice or manual testing, you have to hire proportionately more staff. Since most accessibility experts are pure service providers and do not develop their own software, they are denied this highly profitable SaaS market.
In Western Europe alone, with its around 200 million inhabitants, there is huge sales potential that has hardly been exploited to date. This attracts actors.
AI has so far played a minor role in this context: There are already initial approaches, but they have not yet brought any major gains in terms of time or money. But it doesn't have to stay that way.
The expansion of overlay providers
In addition to the classic product houses, the well-known accessibility overlay providers are now also making massive inroads into this market. They have raised immense amounts of money from investors through venture capital.
The classic overlays - i.e. the widgets that you integrate into a website with a click - are now almost irrelevant for these companies. Their focus has long been on comprehensive monitoring solutions and deeper automation. They promise:
- automatic subtitles and sign language avatars
- AI translations into understandable language
- the fully automatic conversion of inaccessible PDFs into barrier-free documents
The fact that many of these promises are fairy tales and do not work in practice as advertised is another matter. The customer usually does not have the necessary expertise and may never realize that he has been taken for a ride. Only the monitoring bodies can really create awareness here. In my opinion, competition law should also apply at this point: services such as legal compliance are promised that cannot be kept. Unfortunately, many overlay providers have not yet realized that misleading their customers might not be such a good idea. When a disabled customer or a monitoring agency knocks on that customer's door, the rude awakening comes.
Some of these providers are based directly in the EU. They have the advantage that they have already overcome hurdles such as the GDPR or adapting to national markets. They often enter with very low prices in order to quickly gain market share. Once the customer is tied to the system, the lock-in effect follows: The prices are gradually increased because switching would be too costly for the company.
Although experts worldwide warn against these overlay providers and their reputation in the community has been ruined, buyers on the customer side still resort to them. You don't know the technical details. All they see is the convenient promise: spend a lot of money and the accessibility problem will be solved.
Although the overlay providers protect themselves perfectly against liability risks through their general terms and conditions - they often say that they do not guarantee real accessibility - but it usually takes a lot of time for customers to notice this.
The future: great need for advice from experts
This is exactly where a new, important task arises for us accessibility experts. There is an enormous need for advice. In the best case scenario, customers get us on board before they make a purchase so that we can protect them from making bad decisions. In the worst case scenario, we have to do damage control if such a tool has already been purchased.
The market for services will not collapse as a result of this SaaS - on the contrary, it will change and continue to grow.
In the end, a monitoring tool only provides bare numbers. People are still needed to evaluate this data, filter out false positives and write concrete tickets for development.
The focus of our work is finally shifting from pure testing to strategic consulting and process support.