Event app accessibility

Accessibility stopped being optional the moment the event app became the primary way to see the agenda, book meetings, and navigate the venue — if the app is the event's front door, an inaccessible app excludes people from the event itself. The legal exposure is real and growing: the European Accessibility Act now covers many digital services, the ADA has been applied to apps in US litigation, and public-sector clients increasingly require WCAG conformance in procurement. But the practical case is broader than compliance, because accessibility features serve everyone at an event: high contrast helps in glaring hall lighting, large text helps tired eyes on day three, captions help non-native speakers in a noisy venue. In practice, organizers can't retrofit accessibility onto a vendor's platform, so it belongs in procurement — ask for a current WCAG audit or VPAT, not a yes in a sales call, and run a screen reader over the core journeys yourself: registration to profile, agenda to bookmark, request to meeting. The common mistake is checking the app while ignoring the content you pour into it — unlabelled images, PDF floor plans, and colour-only wayfinding cues break an otherwise accessible app. One honest nuance: no event app on the market is perfectly accessible. Ask vendors what's on their accessibility roadmap and what known gaps exist; a specific answer signals maturity, a blank "we're fully compliant" usually signals nobody checked.