Website accessibility in Germany since June 2025

Germany's accessibility law, the BFSG, has applied since 28 June 2025 and transposes EU directive 2019/882 into national law. It covers companies that sell products or offer services to consumers through a website, an online shop or an app, and it requires those channels to work for people with visual, hearing, motor or cognitive limitations.

Small companies get an exemption, but it is narrower than it first sounds. A company is exempt only when it has fewer than ten employees and an annual turnover below two million euro at the same time, and the exemption covers services only. Meeting just one of the two conditions does not qualify.

The exemption disappears entirely once a company sells products. A two person shop selling to consumers online carries the same obligations as a company with two hundred employees. The law asks what is being sold, not how large the business is.

A website that speaks only to other businesses and sells nothing directly to consumers usually falls outside the scope. What decides the question is who the offer is addressed to, not the industry or the company's size.

The law defines accessibility through four properties. Content has to be perceivable, operable, understandable and compatible with assistive technology such as screen readers. In practice the European standard EN 301 549 spells these four points out, building on the WCAG level AA criteria that have served as the web's accessibility benchmark for years.

A company within the scope of the BFSG has to publish an accessibility statement on its website, a dedicated page describing the current state of accessibility, naming known limitations and offering a way to report problems. That page does not solve accessibility by itself, but it is required regardless of how accessible the site actually is.

You can check your own site without hiring anyone, and the first test takes only a few minutes. Walk the entire path from the homepage to sending an enquiry using nothing but the keyboard, Tab and Enter, and leave the mouse alone. If focus disappears somewhere along the way or a button refuses to trigger, that is already a real finding.

The second test is zooming in. Set the page to 200 percent in the browser and check whether text gets cut off and whether buttons and fields stay reachable. The third test looks at forms, every field needs a visible label that survives typing, and an error message has to explain in words what went wrong instead of relying on a red outline alone.

On an ordinary company website the same handful of things usually fail. Grey text on a light background with too little contrast, images with no description, form fields with no labels, and pop ups that refuse to close from the keyboard.

Compliance is monitored by the market surveillance authorities of Germany's federal states. Consumers and consumer associations can file a complaint, after which the authority demands a fix and can impose a fine.

For an older website, it makes more sense to start with the path to an enquiry or a purchase than with a full rebuild. A form that works and a checkout that works matter more to a real visitor than an accessible page about the company, and that is where a first pass pays off.

This text explains the legal requirements and does not replace legal advice. Whether a particular company falls under the BFSG depends on what it sells, its size and who its offer is addressed to, and a specialist should make that call in unclear cases.