Accessible Websites & BFSG - 2025 It's Getting Serious

The chaos surrounding the introduction of the GDPR threatens to repeat itself: From June 2025, the rules of the BFSG regarding the accessibility of websites will apply, and many affected companies are still asleep - with potentially costly consequences. As an internet agency, we cannot provide legal advice - but we can shed light on what the new EU/German rules are about and how to practically prepare for the new legal situation in this article.

What It's About

In 2017, over 13.04 million people in Germany lived with a temporary or permanent impairment, 7.8 million of whom had a recognized severe disability - a trend that is increasing. This means that around 16 percent of the population encounter barriers in everyday life due to an impairment of their body structure or function, making it difficult for them to participate in social life (Source: Federal Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs [German]). In most cases, these individuals acquire their disabilities later in life, for example, through illness, accidents, or aging.

To eliminate barriers for these individuals and to align corresponding regulations across the EU, the EU issued the "Directive (EU) 2019/882 of the European Parliament and of the Council of April 17, 2019, on the Accessibility Requirements for Products and Services" in April 2019. This directive has been transposed into German law through the Accessibility Strengthening Act (BFSG) [German]. This law empowers the German Federal Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs, in collaboration with other ministries, to issue a regulation that specifies the exact accessibility requirements for products and services (§3 Para. 2 BFSG). These ministries have since done so with the Regulation on the Accessibility Strengthening Act (BFSGV) [German].

What is Regulated in BFSG and BFSGV?

Who exactly is affected by the BFSG and the BFSGV? And what is regulated there?

The BFSG fundamentally regulates that certain products and services will be subject to strict accessibility requirements in the future. These include products such as:

• Computers and their operating systems
• Smartphones
• ATMs
• Ticket and check-in machines
• E-book readers and
• Routers,

as well as services such as

• Telecommunications services
• E-books
• Messaging services
• Banking services
• Passenger transport and its digital solutions (such as ticket apps) and
• electronic commerce.

The last point may seem inconspicuous at first glance, but it hides the probably largest group of services. According to the definition in §2 No. 26 BFSG, these services include "services of telemedia that are offered via websites and applications on mobile devices and are provided electronically and at the individual request of a consumer with regard to the conclusion of a consumer contract". In plain language: Almost all websites and apps aimed at concluding a contract with a consumer must meet the accessibility requirements of the BFSG.

Exceptions exist only for micro-enterprises (with fewer than 10 employees or under 2 million euros in revenue, §2 No. 17 BFSG) and for disproportionate burdens (§17 Para. 1 BFSG).

What Needs to Be Done?

So what exactly do affected companies need to do and consider? It is not so easy to find out. The BFSGV states the following:

"In order for services to meet the requirements of § 3 paragraph 1 sentence 2 of the Accessibility Strengthening Act, (...) 3. Websites, including associated online applications and services offered on mobile devices, including mobile apps, must be designed in a consistent and appropriate manner to be perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust" (§12 BFSGV, emphasis added)

However, what this means was not initially regulated. §3 Para. 2 BFSGV merely refers to the fact that the Federal Agency for Accessibility regularly publishes a list of the most important standards to be observed, "from which the accessibility requirements (...) are detailed". This has not yet happened. The Federal Agency for Accessibility currently only refers to the EU standard EN 301 549 > - as of 7 August 2024 still under revision - which sets standards for the areas of websites (Chapter 9) and software (Chapter 11).

EN 301 549 and the Success Criteria of WCAG

The EN 301 549 references a list of standards developed by the "World Wide Web Consortium" W3C, an organization for the development of web standards: the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). Their structure in the relevant Chapter 9 for websites corresponds to the four points I quoted above from §12 BFSGV. We will now take a closer look at them individually:

Perceivable

A website must first be perceivable in the respective mode of use (2-senses principle). This is technically ensured, among other things, by the following measures:

• Descriptive alternative texts for images and videos
• Subtitles for videos
• Semantically clear page and content structure
• Responsive display of content on all screens
• Avoidance of problematic color combinations (e.g., red-green)
• Sufficient contrast of text and non-text objects to the background
• Sufficient line spacing
• Zoomability of the website to at least 200%
• ...

These points are often very precisely defined. For example, content is only considered responsive if it can still be displayed without issues at a screen width of 320 pixels and a height of 256 pixels. Sufficient contrast is only given at normal font size if it is in the ratio of 4.8:1. For large or bold text, a ratio of 3:1 is sufficient, the same as for non-text elements.

Operable

Success criteria for the operability of a website are also regulated in the WCAG and adopted in EN 301 549. Thus, the following measures ensure that people with disabilities can operate a website:

• Enabling keyboard control with a meaningful focus order
• Ability to stop, pause, and hide automatically playing content.
• Ability to adjust the playback speed of videos and audio content.
• Avoidance of flashing and rapidly changing content (due to epilepsy and similar conditions)
• Page titles and descriptions
• Provision of various navigation paths (e.g., via sitemaps or breadcrumbs)
• Meaningful labels for form fields
• ...

In particular, you can easily test keyboard control yourself by pressing the Tab key in any browser (Firefox, Chrome, etc.). A focus field should become visible over a link that you can select with "Enter". You should also be able to jump back and forth between the various links using Tab (or backward with Shift+Tab). A meaningful order should be found in doing this.

Understandable

The content and controls of a website must also be understandable. They are when, among other things, the following is taken into account:

• The language of a page and individual elements has been clearly specified in the code
• The navigation is coherent throughout the page
• Error messages and labels are clearly recognizable and understandable
• ...

Robust

The last criterion for accessibility according to WCAG is robustness. It includes, among other things, the following success criteria:

• The website must be readable by various user agents (browsers, screen readers, etc.).
• Names, roles, and values of form elements, buttons, etc. must be clearly and coherently defined.
• Status messages (e.g., "Product has been added to the cart") should be defined in such a way that screen readers and other assistive technologies can notice them even when they are not in focus.
• ...

What Else to Consider

Beyond §12 BFSGV and the criteria of EN 301 549, the following points are particularly important:

• Websites must generally be developed to "be oriented towards the needs of people with disabilities and ensure interoperability with assistive technologies [such as screen readers, note]" (§13 BFSGV).
• In online shops, accessibility information must be provided for the respective products and for the website itself, as far as they are available from the manufacturer, importer, etc. (§19 No. 1 BFSGV). This means in practice that you will soon need to find a statement on accessibility in online shops just as you would a privacy statement.
• A website must have at least one mode of operation that allows use with no vision and one that does not require color distinction (§21 Para. 1 BFSGV).
• Controls on websites that trigger photosensitive seizures should be avoided (§21 Para. 6 BFSGV). Sliders and animations on websites can be particularly problematic here.
• Websites must be equipped with at least one mode of operation that "includes functions that facilitate and simplify use for people with cognitive impairments." (§21 Para. 7 BFSGV). This can mean that navigation and the core content of the website should not be too complicated. Long, convoluted sentences, difficult-to-understand formulations, and the use of abbreviations and acronyms should be avoided as much as possible (so I have essentially done everything wrong with this text...).
• The privacy of users must also be maintained in the accessible functions of a website (e.g., during authentications), §21 Para. 8.

Summary and Final Thoughts

Unfortunately, it is typical for EU legislation that even a year before the entry into force of a norm (with the corresponding threats of sanctions, which can range up to fines of €100,000 and the shutdown of a website), the practical measures for implementing this norm are still "in progress." But we at least have guidelines on how an accessible website should be designed - and these are actually nothing new. What is new is primarily the legal bindingness for private actors.

As extensive as the measures may seem - if accessibility has already been considered in the design and development of a website or software, it is not a significant additional effort. That may look different if one has to retroactively make an already completed online shop accessible. But there is still plenty of time for that - and I can only advise affected companies not to delay this topic for too long. Unlike during the introduction of the GDPR, there are significantly fewer experts available to advise on accessibility and implement necessary measures.

Even for those who are not affected by the BFSG, engaging with the topic is worthwhile. Google, for example, consistently ranks accessible websites higher in its search results than others. And as I mentioned at the beginning: This topic concerns around 16% of the population, including a growing number of older people with significant purchasing power. The incentives are ample - take action!