Accessibility is No Longer Optional, and 2025 Proved It

Accessibility is No Longer Optional, and 2025 Proved It

In 2025, digital accessibility stopped being a “nice to have” and became a clear business priority. Regulation tightened, enforcement increased, and emerging technologies like AI began reshaping how organisations approach inclusive design. For many businesses, this meant real commercial risk, but also a significant opportunity to improve experiences for all users.

From my perspective, as an accessibility practice lead at Foolproof, three major shifts stood out as signals of meaningful change -

First, the year marked a significant turning point as the European Accessibility Act came into force, making digital accessibility a legal requirement across large markets and exposing organisations to real compliance risk.

Second, enforcement and litigation intensified. Governments and courts worldwide stepped up action, with a rise in accessibility-related lawsuits and penalties (especially for overlay accessibility components within the USA) that pushed businesses to treat accessibility as a serious legal and reputational priority.

And of course AI became increasingly embedded in mainstream platforms, pushing features such as automated image descriptions, speech interaction and personalisation. While promising, these developments have not always delivered success… but I’ll come back to that.

Let’s talk a bit more on those key shifts, and why they, and last year as a whole, feel so monumental to me as an accessibility practice lead at Foolproof.

Regulation has teeth now

The European Accessibility Act was the main talk of 2025 for regulation. It’s no longer a distant policy discussion anymore, it’s been enacted, and the repercussions are very real, with some countries giving out prison sentences for non-compliance.

But it’s not just the EAA, there’s the USA’s Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), Canada’s Accessible Canada Act (ACA), and Australia’s Disability Discrimination Act 1992 (DDA) to name just a few. For many organisations, this is the first time accessibility has carried direct commercial and operational implications across multiple markets. It’s no longer something handled quietly within a digital team, it’s reaching procurement, legal, product, compliance and board-level conversations.

And importantly, it finally seems to be shifting behaviour.

At Foolproof, we’re seeing first hand companies move away from quick-fix overlay tools that promise instant compliance without addressing the underlying experience. The narrative is changing from “How can we quick fix this?” to “How do we design this properly in the first place?”

This is all a significant and extremely welcome shift.

From automated scans to real user experience

Another change that feels especially important is the growing understanding that accessibility can’t be measured by automation alone.

Automated scans still have their place, and I’m sure they always will. They’re useful for catching low-hanging technical issues at scale. But as with a lot of automated processes like this, they only ever tell part of the story.

Increasingly, organisations are recognising that genuine accessibility requires manual testing, ideally with people with disabilities, observing how products work in real contexts, with real assistive technologies, and real lived experience. It’s one thing to pass a checklist, it’s another to ensure someone can complete a task independently and importantly, with dignity.

This move from compliance theatre to meaningful validation is, in my view, one of the most positive developments of the past year.

AI: promise, pressure and practical reality

At the same time, AI has rapidly entered the accessibility conversation, it wouldn’t be 2025 without any topic being laced with AI. Clients are asking about it, platforms are embedding it, teams are experimenting with it. As a designer in an agency working with multiple clients, it’s everywhere and it’s of course not going away any time soon.

We’ve tested AI-generated image descriptions, explored automated remediation suggestions and trialled tools designed to “code with accessibility in mind.” And while there is genuine promise, particularly in supporting people with disabilities at scale, the results are mixed.

AI notoriously misses context, or confidently creates its own which can be even more problematic. It can describe what is visible, but not what is meaningful to that specific journey. It can generate technically correct output that still fails the lived experience test. In some cases, it unfortunately introduces new barriers rather than removing them.

That doesn’t mean it isn’t the future, I think it would be naive to say so. But it’s important to distinguish between AI as assistive technology for disabled users, and AI as a tool for designers trying to remediate accessibility issues. The former is already showing real promise through things like smarter screen readers, captions and adaptive interfaces. The latter, however, is far less mature. AI can help identify issues and suggest fixes, but it can’t replace thoughtful design, contextual understanding or testing with real users.

There will be going to be plenty of companies promising AI as a silver bullet, that it’s the tool that can automatically fix all accessibility issues overnight. Perhaps one day it will get closer to that promise, but we’re certainly not there yet. AI will become a powerful part of the accessibility toolkit, but it won’t “solve” accessibility on its own, and I think believing it might risks creating new problems rather than fixing old ones.

The opportunity is enormous but so is the responsibility, and we need to make sure to not get carried away in the name of ease and speed, forgetting our true goals.

Looking ahead: WCAG 3.0 and a broader definition of accessibility

Overlaying all of this is the evolution of the standards themselves.

WCAG 3.0, the next generation of accessibility guidelines from the W3C, signals a fundamental shift in thinking. Rather than focusing solely on web content and a strict pass/fail checklist model, WCAG 3.0 aims to broaden its scope to apps, software and emerging technologies, and move toward a more flexible, outcomes-based approach centred on real user experience.

It’s still in Working Draft status and likely several years from formal adoption. WCAG 2.2 remains the current legal benchmark, but the direction of travel is clear: accessibility is becoming more holistic, more human-centred and more integrated into the fabric of digital product development.

The last year marked a pivotal moment for digital accessibility. It’s a shift I’m so excited to see gaining momentum across the work we have been doing with our clients.

It’s a joy to finally see accessibility no longer being treated as a compliance afterthought. Our clients are proactively engaging us for audits and consultation, and, more importantly, partnering with us to embed accessibility meaningfully into every deliverable from the outset.

Make sure you're staying at the top of your game when it comes to accessibility, because when accessibility improves, experiences improve for everyone.

And if you’d keen to explore how to get there, Foolproof is always here to help.

^{I’d like to thank Francois Jordaan, Katrin Ertl and Leslie Fountain for reviewing and suggesting changes to this article. The Accessibility Champions at Foolproof would be nothing without them, and I am forever grateful to everything I have learnt from them and the support they have given me over the last few years since I took up leading the Champions.}