Getting Serious: Accessibility Becomes Law

Since the summer of 2025, Austria has had a law that makes digital accessibility binding. Ever since, half-knowledge has been circulating: that every website is covered, that existing sites have until 2030, that an embedded widget settles the matter. We read the statute itself and sort out what it actually says – and what follows from that for your website.

The Austrian Accessibility Act (Barrierefreiheitsgesetz, BaFG, BGBl. I No. 76/2023) took effect on 28 June 2025. From that day on, the products and services covered by the statute have had to be offered accessibly. The BaFG transposes the European Accessibility Act into Austrian law.

For providers, that means the preparation window has closed. The statute does contain a narrowly drafted transitional rule for products already in use – more on that below – but no general grace period. Anyone offering one of the covered services has to meet the requirements. What the Austrian Accessibility Act demands in detail, however, depends heavily on what you actually offer. That is precisely where the most common misunderstanding starts.

The law covers providers of the services that Section 2(2) lists exhaustively. Among them are online shops, consumer banking services and e-books. Anyone who provides none of these services falls outside the statute – even if the website is large, well known or professionally run.

The list is short and exhaustive. “Exhaustive” means: whatever is not on it is not covered. The legislator did not draft the enumeration as a set of examples but as a complete list.

No. A website that informs people about a company, describes its services and offers a contact form provides none of the services named in the statute and is not covered by the Austrian Accessibility Act. Function is what counts: as soon as customers can buy, book or pay on the site, the picture changes.

This clarification matters to us because a great deal around the statute is sold through fear. “Every website has to be accessible now” is simply wrong. The reverse holds too: anyone running a shop, embedding a booking system or offering payment services should look closely at their own situation. In borderline cases – a company website with a bolted-on shop module, say – what is actually offered decides the question, not what the page is called. Only a legal assessment can answer it bindingly; this article is no substitute for one.

Yes, but only for services and only for genuine micro-enterprises. The statute defines one as a company employing fewer than ten people that also has either an annual turnover of no more than two million euros or a balance sheet total of no more than two million euros. For products, the exemption expressly does not apply.

The two conditions work together: the headcount has to stay below ten, and on top of that one of the two financial figures has to stay below the threshold. A company with twelve employees is not a micro-enterprise, however modest its turnover. Anyone relying on the exemption should be able to evidence the figures – to the authority, if it comes to that. We have written up the distinction in our glossary under micro-enterprise exemption.

No, at least not across the board. Until 28 June 2030, the statute allows service providers to continue offering or providing their services using products that they were already lawfully using before 28 June 2025. The wording says nothing about existing websites.

The difference between “product” and “service” is not legal hair-splitting here; it is the heart of the rule. Products in the sense of the statute are things like self-service terminals, payment terminals or e-book readers. Anyone leaning on the transitional provision should therefore have it checked carefully against their own case. We are not a law firm and we give no legal advice – but we would rather say so plainly than lull you into a deadline that does not exist in that form.

The statute provides for fines of up to 80,000 euros; for micro, small and medium-sized companies the ceiling is 50,000 euros. Market surveillance and proceedings are the responsibility of the Sozialministeriumservice. There is no blanket inspection regime – in practice, proceedings usually start with a complaint.

The economic damage, though, rarely sits in the fine. If part of your customer base gets stuck at checkout, you lose revenue long before any authority hears about it. A form that cannot be filled in without a mouse is not a legal problem; it is an abandoned purchase. How supervision and proceedings work is set out in our glossary under market surveillance and sanctions.

The yardstick is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) at conformance level AA, currently in version 2.2. The European standard EN 301 549, on which the legislation builds, adopts these success criteria. Level A on its own is not enough; level AAA is not what the law asks for.

The WCAG are not a design corset but a list of testable criteria. Most of them concern craft rather than looks – an accessible layout usually looks exactly as it did before. The six points that make the biggest difference in our audits:

Put the mouse aside and operate your website with the tab key alone. Can you reach everything? Can you always see where you are? Does the menu open, the form fill in, the dialogue close? That single test takes a few minutes and reveals a surprising amount.

A second test: zoom in substantially in the browser. Does everything stay readable and operable, or does the text start to overlap? Automated checkers additionally find the technical faults the eye misses. They are no substitute for a manual audit, though, because they cannot assess a large share of the criteria at all – “no errors found” does not mean “accessible”. How a structured review works is described on our accessible websites service page.

Yes. Accessibility opens up customers who would otherwise drop out, and it forces clean craft: clear structure, plain language, forms that work. Every visitor benefits from that – in bright sunlight, one-handed on a phone, on the underground with the sound off.

The side effect is technically traceable: the same structure a screen reader announces is the structure search engines and answer engines read. Heading levels, meaningful link text and alternative text are SEO fundamentals at the same time. No automatic ranking advantage follows from this, and anyone promising one is overselling. The connection is indirect but stable: what humans can take in easily, machines usually can too. That is the real reason we treat accessibility not as a retrofit but as part of how a website is built.