This month we were more busy with internal matters than usual, namely due to the EBU General Assembly in Lisbon, where our Strategic Plan for the next four years was approved. Nevertheless, we have some developments to report on for this section of our Newsletter.
On 8 February, the European Parliament and the EU Council reached a provisional agreement found in their negotiations about the European Disability Card/ Parking Card for persons with disabilities proposal. It is overall a good result, with more improvements than deteriorations of the initial proposal, including some (marginal) progress toward extending the scope beyond mere travellers. It is now very likely that the Directive will be adopted before the European elections, but for that the agreement still needs to be approved formally by both institutions. We participated in an European Disability Forum briefing for its members to assess the state of play. A proper analysis of the end-result against our recommendations will follow in March.
We responded to the Party of European Socialists’ request for further input, for the next EU legislature, on social welfare. We reiterated our point about social benefits in the EBU Statement on European Elections 2024, expanding on the findings in the study by the European Social Protection Network for the European Commission and connecting this with what we expect from the European Semester process.
We sent the EBU recommendations for making payment terminals accessible for visually impaired users to the European Central Bank. This comes in the context of their consultations for a study on challenges of digitalisation of payments for vulnerable users. In our efforts to liaise with industry representatives about our recommendations, we obtained meetings (in March) with Payments Europe and European Payments Council. The European Commission’s directorate for Employment and Social Affairs mentioned and linked to our recommendations in the “News” section of their newsletter.
We attended a joint AGE-BEUC webinar to discuss the first draft of the digital euro rulebook. AGE and BEUC are consumers representatives in the Euro Retail Payments Board, which the European Central Bank is consulting on how the digital euro could support financial inclusion of all and how to ensure that it is in line with the European Disability Act.
In our liaison with Fondazione LIA for the promotion of accessible e-books, we felt it necessary to clarify our position that e-books are not the one-size-fits-all solution for accessible reading and that the European Accessible Act does not undermine the importance of the Marrakesh Treaty and that we would not support any activity that would suggest otherwise.
We provided feedback to the European Disability Forum on the following two transport related matters: their draft proposed amendments to the European Commission’s proposals, respectively on better enforcement of passenger rights and on multimodal transport passenger rights; and the draft revised Commission Guidelines on the interpretation of the Regulation on Air Passenger Rights of persons with reduced mobility.
The AccessibleEU resource centre published on its website the document “Accessibility Standards at European Level”, which is very good pedagogical guide on what to make of and how to engage with EU standardisation for disabled people’s organisations.