One year of the Accessibility Act: an honest review

For a good year now, since 28 June 2025, the Austrian Accessibility Act (BaFG) has applied. 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 from the Ministry of Social Affairs, 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 tip-offs were examined. Banking services are affected particularly often: 22 of the pending proceedings fall into this area.

Where these figures come from: they are ministry figures published by the Disability Council on 24 June 2026. We found no publication of them by the authority itself. The state of play is therefore June 2026, not today, and the numbers keep growing.

In addition to these proceedings, the Sozialministeriumservice received 53 reports from companies declaring non-conformities of their own products or services. The law expressly provides for such reports – a report is not a proceeding and is not included in the 84.

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 remains unchanged in the law – up to 80,000 euros, and up to 50,000 for micro, small and medium-sized enterprises, graduated by type of infringement (section 36 BaFG). 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 against nine of the 78 success criteria of WCAG 2.1 – 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.

These figures come with two caveats. First, this is not an independent study but the analysis of a provider that sells accessibility services; no description of the methodology has been published. Second, nine of 78 criteria are a sample, not a full assessment. On top of that comes what applies to automated scans generally – they miss much of what actually hinders people day to day. Helena Selakovic, expert for digital accessibility at Accessiway, points out herself that tools alone do not fully detect barriers. As an indication of direction the numbers still hold: one year in, accessibility is the exception, not the rule.

The analysis names three front-runners: insufficient colour contrast, missing text resizing (WCAG 1.4.4, 200 percent) and rendering errors on smartphones – technically the reflow criterion (WCAG 1.4.10), which showed up on 10 of the 18 Austrian websites. 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. Text resizing 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.

Be careful with self-assessment: a single booking or ordering flow on an otherwise purely informational site can bring that part of the website into scope. For banking, passenger transport and e-book services the obligation applies regardless of any shop function. And “not covered by the BaFG” does not mean “no obligation” – the Disability Equality Act (BGStG) still applies. Whether your case is covered is a question for legal advice, not for us.

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 in code against the criteria of WCAG 2.2 and is tested against them. We only claim what has been measured – body text, for instance, reaches at least 12:1 on every surface and thus level AAA. Since this summer a voluntary accessibility statement has been online. We believe that whoever sells accessibility should show it.

That said: while writing this article we recalculated our own palette and found one spot that had slipped past us. Our accent colour came to 4.33:1 as small text on a light background – just under the required 4.5:1. It went unnoticed because our own test script happened to check the other direction: white on orange instead of orange on white. Both are now corrected, and the checklist has been extended by the missing direction. We are writing this down because it is exactly the pattern the statistics above describe: budgets rarely fail on the hard parts – care fails on the easy ones.

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.