The European Commission has proposed a directive that would lead to all European public sector websites following web-accessibility guidelines by 2015. Currently, less than 10% of European websites follow web-accessibility guidelines. 15% of the working EU population, or 80 million people, have ‘functional limitations or disabilities’ and this number is expected to rise as the population of Europe gets older.
Just one third of the 736,000 public sector websites in Europe follow web-accessibility guidelines, and there is little consistency across Europe in the type of guidelines that each government follows. Under the proposed directive, all member states would follow the same set of guidelines and visitors to websites would benefit from features such as screen readers for text, audio descriptions of images and written captions for audio files. The common guidelines would also make it easier and cheaper for web developers to design accessible websites in different countries.
You can read more about the directive here
