We prepared and held the yearly in-presence meeting of the EBU Commission for Liaising with the EU (“LC”), hosted by our Belgian member Braille Liga-Ligue Braille in Brussels on 17-18 November. This meeting allowed us to present recently adopted EBU documents, recap the advocacy activities and achievements of the past year, discuss ongoing challenges, and think about areas for future work ahead of the EBU General Assembly of 2024. High on the agenda were the Disability Card, the Marrakesh Treaty, Creative Europe/MEDIA funding to the film industry and the European elections of 2024. Recent developments on silent cars and various other mobility/road safety issues were discussed again, and the accessibility of leisure sport activities was also discussed for the first time.
At the LC Meeting, the EBU recommendations for the accessibility of payment terminals were adopted. By the time this newsletter is published, they will have been edited and published on our website. The next step will be to liaise with the industry with this document.
On 2 November, we responded to the European Commission’s consultation about its proposed directive on the European Disability Card and European Parking Card for persons with disabilities. We contributed a follow-up Op-ed article for the magazine Social Europe and we produced a podcast, to be made available early December, with the participation of European Citizen Action Service (ECAS) to stress our point about the need of a more ambitious approach to ensuring free movement in Europe for PWDs, i.e., to cover not only those that are merely ‘travelling’ to another EU country. On 8 November, we received and analysed the draft report of the European Parliament’s Rapporteur (lead negotiator): it is good on all points, except the limited extension of personal scope, to cover people moving their residence only if workers, students or people in an EU exchange programme. In the meantime, another welcome development was that the Commission tabled a separate and parallel proposal, to cover stand-alone mobile third country nationals identically as mobile EU citizens and family members. Through the “Have your Say” portal, we officially communicated our position about the first proposal and welcomed and fully supported this latest development. On 9 November, we attended an EDF event on the proposal, to further coordinate the positions of member organisations. We circulated more widely our position paper within the European Parliament and chased the Rapporteur’s office. Eventually we obtained a meeting with them on 16 November. Our arguments for broader extension of scope of the directive were found convincing and the Rapporteur is willing to support them within the parliament, but they are likely to meet opposition at the EU Council given the Member States’ fear of extra costs. We were informed that the Spanish presidency aimed for the Council to adopt its General Approach (negotiating position) at their EPSCO meeting of November 27-28 (EPSCO meeting). We await confirmation of this and to see the text.
We had further exchange with Visionary Analytics, the consultancy that is preparing a study for the evaluation by the European Commission of the EU’s Marrakesh Treaty legal framework, namely to answer some follow-up questions. These concerned namely the registration obligation for authorised entities, where it exists; measures to prevent abusive use; the ABC business to consumer catalogue; and the obligation in at least two Member States (France and Italy) for authorised entities to verify whether accessible format commercial versions exist and to refrain from producing accessible format copies in that case. This last point deserves our particular attention because we need to ensure that visually impaired readers have the choice of their preferred accessible format for a book, and not have to accept accessible e-books as the only available solution under the effect of the European Accessibility Act.
On 17 November we attended the EU Disability Platform meeting on the European Commission’s draft Guide of good electoral practice. Announced in the European Disability Rights Strategy 2021-2030, this guide addresses participation of citizens with disabilities in the electoral process (i.e., not only as voters). To prepare the guide, the Commission’s DG JUST has been relying on the work of a dedicated subgroup of the European Cooperation Network on elections, a study prepared by a Network of Academics on Citizenship, and consultations with stakeholders, including during a focus group organised on 7 September (which we attended, with follow-up written feedback) and the high-level event on elections organised by the Commission on 23-24 October 2023. The Commission provided a detailed presentation of the guide and invited the comments of civil society stakeholders. We welcomed the draft guide as a very useful and comprehensive tool, and we were glad to hear that DG JUST had used the EBU report resulting from the Accessible Voting Awareness-raising project (AVA).
On 21 November, we responded to the European Commission’s consultation for the Interim evaluation of Erasmus+ 2021-2027 and final evaluation of Erasmus+ 2014-2020, using it as a timely window of opportunity to communicate on the EBU Madrid Declaration of November 2023 “People on the Move: making educational and professional experiences abroad fully inclusive!”
On 22 November we attended an EDF information session for its members, on the AccessibleEU, which gave us a better sense of how this new resource centre will fit in our work, namely in relation to the development of accessibility standards in the wake of the implementation of the European Accessibility Act.
We prepared for the European Day pf Persons with Disabilities yearly event, on 30/11-1/12. More on this in the next edition of this newsletter.