The European Accessibility Resource Centre is one of the landmarks of the rights of persons with disabilities in Europe. In its launching year, it has hosted 90 events, built a Community of Practice of over 1600 members, and built a digital library with over 150 Good Practices and over 130 references on accessibility, surpassing all the objectives by far.

The centre’s director, Jesús Hernández, highlights "the impact of AccessibleEU at a national level thanks to the work of the national accessibility experts"; the cooperation with first-rate institutions such as the International Telecommunication Union, the World Tourism Organization and the Association for the Advancement of Assistive Technology in Europe; the production of support materials “that will be very useful”; the compilation of good practices from the Member States and the success of the Community of Practice. Hernández rates this first year of AccessibleEU as “very successful”. 

Milestones in 2023

One of the biggest goals of AccessibleEU is to train professionals on accessibility through different events in all 27 Member States. A total of 90 events have been held in 2023, seven of them at European level. Specifically, the centre has hosted 25 networking events (two at European level), 34 awareness rising events (two at European level) and 31 workshops (three at European level). 

One of the workshops has involved a 25-hour course on “Designing accessible technologies”, which was open from November to December. 

Another main goal of the project is to share resources on accessibility. In total, the centre has uploaded 37 news items, 153 good practices and 134 library references to the website, surpassing the objectives set for this year. References and practice examples are tagged and can be filtered by keyword, subject, country, language, and publication type and year.   

In the same vein, five guidelines have been uploaded to the website on the following topics: Built environment, Transport, Information and communication technologies, EU policies of accessibility, and Standardisation. 

Furthermore, four newsletters have been sent in 2023. In these, information has been shared about news, events, and accessibility materials, among other things.