Procurement of accessibility monitoring tool - TRAFICOM/163741/02.03.01/2024

The Finnish Transport and Communications Agency Traficom invites Service Providers to participate to a Procurement of accessibility monitoring tool. Traficom monitors the accessibility of approximately 240 websites annually with an automated tool. Accessibility requirements are defined in the Act on the Provision of Digital Services.

Traficom currently uses the SALVIA system developed for this purpose, which is based on the open source QUALWEB testing core. When the contract period ends at the end of 2026, we will tender a solution for a tool for checking the accessibility of websites with an automated tool for monitoring the work. Traficom acquires Software service for simplified monitoring of website accessibility as a SaaS solution.

The Software service is used to automatically check whether a website contain content that does not meet the accessibility requirements of the Act. Accessibility requirements are defined in the European harmonized standard EN 301549 Accessibility requirements for information and communication technology products and services. The objective of the procurement is to facilitate the implementation of the Subscriber's accessibility checks and to free up resources for actual monitoring work instead of developing and maintaining the current monitoring system.

With the procurement, the Subscriber will have access to new features for monitoring work and new reporting methods that will improve the service received by the monitoring targets. We aim for four important strategic benefits:

• Reliability: The system meets the need of the supervisory authority to monitor websites in accordance with the obligations set, and the testing rules are updated when standards or other obligations are updated.
• Efficiency: the Supplier is responsible for maintenance and updates, which frees up staff work for monitoring
• Quality: modern features and reporting methods improve the service to the monitored objects and reduce the workload of the Subscriber
• Security: servers in the EU, the system is tailored to Subscriber's needs. The subject of the procurement is a Software service for monitoring the accessibility of websites as a SaaS solution, accessible via a browser-based user interface. This simplified monitoring procedure, the selection of targets and their number are described in Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2018/1524 in point 1.3 of Annex I (https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX:32018D1524#anx_I ). Traficom acquires a Software service that enables its staff to perform automated accessibility inspections in accordance with the simplified monitoring method. The Subscriber performs monitoring evaluations throughout the year. Accessibility monitoring is aimed at websites that can be freely browsed or behind a login. Traficom defines the monitored targets and sites annually, either at one time or in several batches. Traficom selects some of the pages or the entire site to be evaluated. Evaluations are performed to complete web pages in the website. Each of the web pages selected for evaluation are identified by a unique URL or by other means e.g. in cases where the website is a single-page app or otherwise contains dynamic content that cannot been reached with a URL alone without additional events performed by the user or automated scripts. Traficom shall submit to the Website Service Provider an inspection report on the performance of the inspection and its results, which shall include, among other things, the accessibility deficiencies found on the evaluated pages. If necessary, Traficom shall provide guidance to the service provider subject to supervision on correcting the deficiencies. Traficom currently supervises approximately 240 websites annually. It is possible that the number may increase to, for example, 500 websites due to regulatory changes. However, Traficom does not commit to the number of websites to be supervised. Websites selected for supervision will generally undergo one inspection during one supervision period. The number of pages to be inspected on a website may vary, but maximum number of pages per website is 150. The website may be selected for inspection again in the next supervision period, and therefore the previous assessments with reports must be available in the system. Traficom also performs in-depth review of websites. This in-depth review procedure, the selection of targets and their number are described in Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2018/1524 in point 1.2 of Annex I (https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX:32018D1524#anx_I) At the moment in-depth review is done manually by inspectors. If the new Software service provides in-depth review, Traficom may implement the feature during the implementation project. The whole Software service and all Traficom's material processed in the software service must be located in the European Union or the European Economic Area (EEA).