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AI regulation news usually sounds like someone else’s problem. Banned use cases, fines as a percentage of revenue — that reads like legal’s department, not ours. But a provision that takes effect on August 2 contains this sentence: Ensure that high-risk AI systems comply with the accessibility requirements in accordance with Directives (EU) 2016/2102 and (EU) 2019/882 Those two directives are the Web Accessibility Directive and the European Accessibility Act (EAA). In other words, an AI regulation has pulled accessibility standards into itself. Whether you’re building an AI system or deploying one, once it’s classified as high-risk, accessibility stops being “nice to have” and becomes a conformity assessment item. ...

Say you run an accessibility checker. You feed it a site’s URL, and the checker has to decide: which pages should it actually look at? Is the homepage enough? If so, you don’t have much basis for saying “this site is accessible” or “this site isn’t.” But checking every page isn’t realistic either — forums, blogs, and shopping sites can have hundreds or thousands of posts. Auditing all of them blows the time and cost budget. ...