The Accessibility Menu, a Friend to Eschew?
During our 2024 audit campaign, we discovered that more and more websites are implementing an "accessibility menu." In 2024, 20% of the sites for which we conducted a simplified audit had one. Here's an analysis of the impact of these menus on the accessibility of sites that use this technology.
Tuesday, March 18, 2025
What is an accessibility menu?
Such a menu can often be opened by a button with an icon representing a disability, such as the Vitruvian Man or a person in a wheelchair.
These accessibility menus allow you to customize certain site presentation settings related to accessibility, such as changing text size, enabling enhanced contrast, managing text spacing, etc.
In Luxembourg, public websites subject to the law of May 28, 2019, must comply with the accessibility rules defined in the European standard EN 301 549, "Accessibility requirements for ICT products and services." This standard is implemented in the Luxembourg accessibility framework RAWeb.
Some features offered by these accessibility menus help meet legal requirements. This is particularly the case with the "enhanced contrast" mode. If the graphic design of a site cannot easily be brought into compliance with criterion 3.2 relating to text contrast, an enhanced contrast mode is an acceptable alternative to achieve this objective.
Other features offered by these accessibility menus meet requirements that go beyond those required by the European standard. For example, zooming, enlarging the text, enlarging the cursor, and offering a dyslexic font: all these features go beyond legal requirements. We recommend prioritizing compliance with the standard before going beyond its requirements.
Finally, some settings offered by accessibility menus can also be managed at the browser or operating system level (e.g., text size, enhanced contrast, reduced animations). They are therefore independent of the site visited, have the advantage of applying to all sites, and therefore do not require configuration on each new site visited.
Analysis of the impact of menus on accessibility
In our 2024 simplified audit campaign, we audited 93 websites. Among these, 19 had an accessibility menu and 16 had an accessibility menu that caused at least one accessibility issue.
Description of graph 1.
This column chart shows the average accessibility scores for all sites (overall, 61%), sites with an accessibility menu (53%), and sites without an accessibility menu (63%), across the 93 public sites targeted for simplified audits in 2024.
Accessibility score of different website categories in the 2024 audit campaign
The average accessibility score across the 93 websites was 61% for the accessibility criteria tested in the simplified audit. When an accessibility menu is in place, the accessibility score drops to 53%, and for sites without an accessibility menu, the score is 63%.
There is therefore a correlation between the implementation of an accessibility menu and a lower level of accessibility: when a menu is present, the level of accessibility is lower. There is also a causal relationship; some of the additional problems encountered are directly due to this menu or its integration into the site.
One of the recurring problems we detected on sites with a menu was related to the enhanced contrast feature. When this feature is enabled, there should be no loss of information; all content must remain readable with a high level of contrast. This was often not the case.
Additional accessibility criteria to be met
The European standard and the Luxembourg framework require that:
all accessibility features be documented, for example in the accessibility statement (criterion 14.1);
the button for activating an accessibility feature meets the needs of the users concerned (criterion 14.2). E.g., a button to activate a high contrast mode must itself be in high contrast, otherwise the user who needs it will not be able to find it.
Without an accessibility menu on a website, these criteria are not applicable and therefore have no impact on the compliance with the European standard.
To summarize
While implementing an accessibility menu on a website may seem like a quick win for improving the quality of life of people with disabilities, we have seen in this article that this is not always the case. Without truly considering digital accessibility, there is a risk of adding accessibility problems without solving existing ones. Implementing such a menu is, of course, not prohibited, but it will be necessary to test its integration to ensure that it is indeed accessible and meets the specific criteria for these technologies. We also recommend carrying out a comprehensive accessibility assessment, which can start with an audit carried out by experts, in order to know where we stand and to prioritize the corrections to be implemented.