I'm applying to the EU civil service, and the experience with the accessibility of the process is... suboptimal.
On the 31st of August at 10:30, Central European Summer Time, I received an email from EPSO (European Personnel Selection Office, which runs the process) asking me to verify whether the tests were accessible, in particular questions 11 to 15, and gave me a link to try it out.
They asked me to reply to this by the 2nd of September at 17:00, CEST. I was very lucky I returned from holidays in time to do this. 2 working days is not a reasonable deadline to do accessibility testing which should be done by the institution itself.
To add to my concern, but I must admit not to my surprise, I checked the test and found out the information for questions 11 to 15 (the numerical part of the reasoning test) is completely inaccessible, with the data necessary for the calculations presented as an image file with an arbitrary name such as ES3733N.
Just in case I checked an accessibility panel on the test, which contained completely unhelpful tools for me, though I'm sure they're vital to others, involving colour contrast, text size, and the like.
The calculator available as a tool is, I think, not technically inaccessible, but unusable on a timed test, given the way the interface works, requiring linear navigation through a list of buttons to input the numbers and the operations.
I try to not be too demanding about accessibility, but there are at least three things that bother me about this: the unreasonably short deadline, the off-loading of accessibility testing to candidates, and the fact there doesn't seem to have been any thought given to the issue. It does not require an especially knowledgeable person to work out tabular data given as an image with no alt text and no structured description isn't going to be a lot of use to a
screen reader.