One year of the Accessibility Act: an honest review

A good year ago, on 28 June 2025, the Austrian Accessibility Act (BaFG) came into force. Back then we wrote down who it really affects – and promised to stay honest: no scaremongering, no appeasement. Time for a review: What has actually happened since? Are there fines yet? And how accessible are websites today, really?

More than many assume – and less than some feared. According to figures published by the Austrian Disability Council for the anniversary, the market surveillance authority at the Sozialministeriumservice has opened 84 proceedings since June 2025, 74 of which were still pending at the reference date. 36 proceedings were initiated ex officio and 48 tips from the public were examined. Notably, 53 reports came from companies themselves declaring non-conformities – the law expressly provides for this self-reporting. The largest single area is banking services, with 22 proceedings.

The Disability Council calls the law an important first step while warning against resting on it – implementing digital accessibility is a permanent task, not a project with an end date. That matches our experience from projects.

No – not yet. In the first year not a single administrative fine was imposed; the authority explicitly works by the principle of “advise before punish”. Reading that as an all-clear would be a mistake, though: the penalty range of up to 80,000 euros remains unchanged in the law, and 74 pending proceedings mean 74 companies currently having to demonstrate how they are fixing things. The most comfortable position is still not to appear in such a proceeding in the first place.

Soberingly little. An analysis carried out in May and June 2026 by the accessibility provider Accessiway examined 107 websites of listed companies in five European countries – the 18 Austrian websites tested came last, with an average of 3.9 barriers per website. Mind you: these are large, professionally maintained sites. The picture for smaller websites is unlikely to be better.

Automated scans need careful reading – they miss much of what actually hinders people day to day, and the study's author herself notes that tools alone do not fully detect barriers. Still, as an indication of direction the numbers hold: one year in, accessibility is the exception, not the rule.

The analysis names three front-runners: insufficient colour contrast, missing zoom support and rendering errors on smartphones. The remarkable part: none of these is technically hard. Whether a contrast is sufficient is not a matter of taste but of arithmetic – try it yourself in our contrast tool, which uses the same WCAG formula that testing tools apply. Zoom up to 200 percent and clean mobile rendering are craft, not magic.

That precisely these basics top the statistics says a lot: budgets rarely fail on the hard parts – care fails on the easy ones.

The scope has not changed – who the law covers and who it does not is laid out in our foundational article. In short: certain consumer-facing services are covered, above all online shops; a plain company website without shop or booking functions is not, and micro-enterprises are exempt for services.

The first year's record does shift the calculation, though: the grace-period rhetoric (“they don't fine anyone anyway”) only carries until the first proceeding lands in your own inbox – and with 84 proceedings opened, that is no longer a theoretical quantity. Add what applies regardless of the law: accessible websites reach more people, work better on every device and provide cleaner structures that search engines and AI assistants parse more easily. Whoever tidies up now does so at their own pace instead of under procedural pressure.

We hold ourselves to it: our own website is built to WCAG 2.2 AA, the core colours reach level AAA for text contrast, and since this summer a voluntary accessibility statement has been online – voluntary because our B2B website formally does not even fall under the law. We believe that whoever sells accessibility should show it. If you want to know where your website stands, an honest look at the current state is the best first step – without panic and without overlay miracle cures.

As always: this article is not legal advice – for questions about your own obligations, consult qualified legal counsel.