Osteoporosenews.be is one of Amgen Belgium's primary disease-awareness platforms for patients managing bone-health conditions. It hosts the content a newly diagnosed patient is most likely to search for: what osteoporosis is, how it is diagnosed, which treatments exist, and how others live with it.
A WCAG 2.0/2.1/2.2 audit completed on 28 May 2026 found that the site, in its current state, does not reliably deliver that content to assistive-technology users. Across eight sampled pages, the audit logged 3 critical and 8 high-severity findings. The pattern is familiar from other pharma audits Promedia has run: a small number of shared components, repeated hundreds of times, generate the bulk of the barriers.
The timing matters. Directive (EU) 2019/882, the European Accessibility Act, became enforceable across all 27 Member States on 28 June 2025.
The three critical findings on osteoporosenews.be each map to a specific moment where a patient is cut off from information.
The first is a 4.1.2 ARIA attribute failure: 245 instances of unsupported ARIA attributes across interactive elements, concentrated on the navigation trigger and six other element types. For a JAWS, NVDA, or VoiceOver user, this means the screen reader announces a contradictory role, or skips the control entirely. On /behandelingen and /diagnose, that translates to a patient unable to open the menu that leads to their treatment options.
The second is a 1.1.1 image-alt failure: 91 down-arrow images with no alt attribute. Screen readers fall back to reading the filename aloud. These arrows appear to act as section indicators on treatment and diagnosis pages, so the reading flow breaks precisely where clinical content begins.
The third is a 4.1.2 form-label failure: the header search field, repeated 75 times across the site, has no programmatic label. A patient who relies on search to find a specific medicine name lands on a control that announces only "edit text".
None of these are edge cases. They are the entry points to the site.
The Amgen findings are consistent with what Promedia sees repeatedly across pharma digital estates. In a recent multibrand email design-system audit, 132 critical accessibility findings traced back to shared tokens and master components rather than individual page instances. Two token updates resolved roughly 150 of 163 findings. The same logic applies here: the unlabelled search field is in one header template, and the broken ARIA attributes sit on a small set of reused interactive components.
The failure modes cluster around four recurring patterns:
These are not exotic findings. They are the same four categories that dominate EN 301 549 conformance reports across the sector. The reason they persist is structural: live-site audits surface issues that design-system linting alone cannot catch, and most pharma brands audit one without the other.
The Amgen findings are fixable, and the fix order matters because most of the volume comes from a small number of shared components.
A workable sequence:
This sequence reflects the methodology Promedia has applied on osteoporosis patient platforms before, including the UCB bone-health portal where accessibility and live-text requirements were specified at the page-element level rather than left to component defaults. It is also consistent with what the AbbVie Skyrizi UX audit showed on the commercial side: removing digital barriers, including a guest login that requires only the EU code, was estimated to cut registration dropout by 50% and lift traffic by 50%. Accessibility and conversion sit on the same axis.
The recurring failures are 1.1.1 (missing image alt text), 1.4.3 (colour contrast), 2.5.5 (touch target size), 4.1.2 (name, role, value, covering both unlabelled form fields and invalid ARIA attributes), and 2.4.7 (focus visibility). The Amgen Belgium audit hit three of these on a single site.
When an ARIA attribute is not permitted for its assigned role, screen readers like JAWS, NVDA, and VoiceOver receive contradictory information. The control may be announced with the wrong role, ignored entirely, or read with a misleading state. On a treatment page, that can mean a patient cannot open the menu that leads to dosage or side-effect information.
If your affiliate runs a Belgian or pan-EU patient-facing site, the practical step this quarter is to commission an EN 301 549 audit that covers both the live site and the underlying design system, then publish a remediation backlog with owners and dates. The Amgen findings show how quickly volume builds when a shared component carries a defect: one unlabelled input becomes 75 failures.
Fix at the source, validate on the live site, and keep a current conformance statement on file. That is what regulators and advocacy groups will ask for, in that order.
Promedia runs WCAG and EN 301 549 audits on pharma patient platforms across Belgium and the wider EU, including bone-health portals. If you want a second opinion on where your site sits today, we are happy to take a look.
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