There are two common reactions to the Accessibility Act, and both usually miss. One: this cannot possibly apply to my small business site. The other: my website is now illegal. For most small Austrian businesses, neither is true. It comes down to a decision you can make for your own case in a few minutes, and then to a list of things the site has to do. This walks through both.
One note up front: this is not legal advice. Where it gets close to the line, your specific situation needs checking, and if there is real doubt, by someone qualified to judge it. What this piece does is the groundwork, so you understand what is at stake, can tell whether you even need to look harder, and know which of the answers comes with a bill attached.
Does the accessibility law apply to your website?
Two things decide it: what your website lets a visitor do, and how big your business is. If a visitor can close a sale, a booking or a subscription on the site, it does the kind of thing the law names. If you employ fewer than 10 people and stay at or below the money line of € 2 million, measured on either yearly revenue or the balance-sheet total, the microenterprise exemption takes you back out.
The Barrierefreiheitsgesetz, BaFG for short, has been in force since 28 June 2025. It implements EU Directive 2019/882, the European Accessibility Act, for Austria. One thing worth flagging, because most search results and AI answers get it wrong: the Austrian law is the BaFG, and the consolidated text is public in the RIS legal information system. Germany has its own law, the Barrierefreiheitsstärkungsgesetz (BFSG). The thresholds and the compliance date are identical, but fines there run to € 100.000 without the reduced tiers for smaller businesses that the Austrian law sets at € 80.000, market surveillance sits with the individual Länder rather than one federal authority, and the paragraphs are numbered differently, so every paragraph citation on this page is an Austrian one. A lot of German-language coverage points at the German rules and misses the Austrian detail. If you run a business in Austria, the BaFG is the one that applies to you.
Under § 21 BaFG the competent authority is the Bundesamt für Soziales und Behindertenwesen, the Sozialministeriumservice, and § 22 hands it the market surveillance job. The statute does not say which of its offices does the work, and the Sozialministeriumservice points to its own Landesstelle Oberösterreich. Under § 35 a consumer can flag a suspected breach and gets a written answer within eight weeks, in an accessible format, saying whether a procedure is being opened. The fines under § 36 are imposed by the Sozialministeriumservice as well.
Which websites does the BaFG name?
§ 2 BaFG lists the covered products and services exhaustively, and one of the entries on that list is services in electronic commerce. That entry is about the transaction your website carries out, which is why reasoning from your trade gives you the wrong answer. WKO’s guidance on the BaFG in e-commerce spells out what falls under it:
- Web shops and apps in e-commerce
- Hotel and travel portals where bookings can be made
- Online appointment booking tools
- Publishers offering digital publications
- Websites where digital memberships and subscriptions can be signed up for
The third item is the one that catches people out. WKO states plainly that online appointment booking tools are covered even where the underlying service itself would not fall under the BaFG, and gives tourism businesses selling a room directly online as its example. That is how a physiotherapy practice, a workshop or a studio ends up in scope: the law looks at the booking tool on the website, regardless of the trade behind it.
Beyond e-commerce, the law names other consumer-facing services: consumer banking, electronic communications such as calls, messaging and internet access, digital books, services that provide access to audiovisual media, and information and booking services for long-distance passenger transport.
Does a contact form put you in scope?
This is the boundary case, and the honest answer is that it is unsettled. § 3 Z 27 BaFG defines a service in electronic commerce as one supplied electronically, at a consumer’s individual request, with a view to concluding a consumer contract. A tool that closes the booking online is squarely that. A form that only asks a practice to call you back is where the argument starts, and WKO’s FAQ on the BaFG in e-commerce says so in as many words: “This question is unfortunately contested.”
The two readings WKO sets out:
| Reading | Argument | Consequence for you |
|---|---|---|
| A strict one | An interactive contact form could in theory lead to a contract or a purchase enquiry, so it is enough | The whole website falls under the BaFG |
| A narrower one | A contact form normally produces an enquiry that someone still has to work by hand before any contract exists, all the more so where the form says it takes no binding orders | The form alone does not pull the site in |
WKO closes the question by saying nobody can yet tell which reading will prevail in official checks in Austria and then across the EU, and it expects those checks to follow the advise-before-penalise principle in the meantime. Its practical tip is to build at least the contact form itself accessibly while the question stays open. That is a cheap hedge, and it is the one we would give too.
Does the size test change the answer?
WKO works the whole question through with the same business twice on its general BaFG information page, and the pair is worth reading together.
| WKO’s worked example | Covered? | Why |
|---|---|---|
| A foot care business with more than 10 staff and over € 2 million annual turnover. Its site takes online appointments and sells care products. | Yes | Neither foot care nor care products appear in § 2 BaFG. The business still has to meet the requirements, because the website runs services in electronic commerce. |
| The same foot care business with 3 staff and € 800.000 annual turnover. | No | It offers exactly the same services in electronic commerce and is out anyway, because it is a microenterprise. |
Who is exempt: the microenterprise exemption
You are exempt as a microenterprise if you employ fewer than 10 people and also stay under the money line: at most € 2 million in annual turnover, or at most € 2 million in balance-sheet total. Either of those two figures is enough. Those thresholds sit in § 3 (19) BaFG. If you provide a service, which is what a website normally does, § 6 (1) BaFG exempts you from the accessibility requirements and from every obligation that goes with meeting them.
Both conditions have to hold. The headcount test and the money test:
| Test | Exemption applies | Exemption does not apply |
|---|---|---|
| Employees | fewer than 10 | 10 or more |
| Annual turnover or balance-sheet total | at most € 2 million (either figure qualifies) | both above € 2 million |
If the left column is true on both rows, you are exempt as a microenterprise for your service. The moment one row flips to the right, meaning 10 or more employees, or turnover and balance-sheet total both above € 2 million, the exemption no longer holds.
Counting the people has its own rules, and they matter once the size test is doing the work. The BaFG itself says only that the business employs fewer than ten people, and names no counting method. WKO points at the EU’s SME definition for that: there the figure is annual work units, so a full-year full-time position counts as one, part-timers and anyone employed for only part of the year count pro rata, and apprentices do not count at all. A studio with twelve part-timers can land well under ten.
One distinction that rarely gets drawn cleanly: this full exemption is for services. The few businesses that place a covered product on the market, self-service terminals or e-book readers for example, only get lighter administrative obligations. For a typical company website the service category is the one that matters, and that is where the full exemption sits.
Does the exemption settle the question for good?
Only for the BaFG. A second Austrian law is in play: the Bundes-Behindertengleichstellungsgesetz (BGStG) bars discrimination against people with disabilities and covers websites that supply goods and services, webshops included. WKO answers the question directly, and the answer is yes, accessibility can still be required of a business the BaFG exempts.
The BGStG carries its own escape hatch, and it is a softer one than the BaFG’s: it gives way where accessibility would be a disproportionate burden, usually a financial one, judged with the company’s economic capacity in mind. A breach is handled under civil law, through conciliation proceedings and possible damages claims. Worth knowing before you close the tab on the strength of the microenterprise exemption alone.
What if you grow past the line?
The exemption describes where you are now, and it travels with your headcount and your turnover. WKO makes the practical point directly: webshops belonging to microenterprises are exempt, but if the business grows, changing the shop after the fact is likely to be more work than building it accessibly from the start. If you are anywhere near 10 people or near the € 2 million mark, that is worth knowing before you commission a rebuild, because the cheap moment to handle this is while you are already paying someone to touch the site.
Since when does this apply, and is there a transition period for an existing website?
The short answer: the BaFG has applied since 28 June 2025, and there is no transition period for the website itself. § 37 (1) brings the law into force on that date. The compliance date is not ahead of you, it is behind you.
The figure that circulates is 2030, and it belongs to something else. § 37 (2) lets service providers go on offering their services until 28 June 2030 using products they had already lawfully deployed for that purpose before 28 June 2025, and lets service contracts agreed before that date run unchanged until they end, for no more than five years from the date. Products, in the law’s sense, are devices: hardware and the operating systems built for it, terminals, readers. Your existing website is not one of them, and it does not inherit that deadline.
| Provision | Deadline | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| § 37 (1) | since 28 June 2025 | the law as a whole, websites in scope included |
| § 37 (2) | until 28 June 2030 | products lawfully in use before that date, and service contracts agreed before it, the latter for at most five years |
| § 37 (3) | end of economic life, at most 20 years from first use and no later than 28 June 2040 | self-service terminals already in use before that date |
In practice: if the two tests above reach you, your site has been in scope since June 2025, whenever it was built. A relaunch does not trigger the duty, and an old build date does not postpone it. What the Sozialministeriumservice did with that in the first year is further down, under “What happens if you ignore it?”.
The scope question in three steps
Three steps and you have your answer on scope:
- Look at what your website lets a visitor do. Can someone conclude a purchase, a booking or a subscription on it? If the only interactive element is an enquiry form, you are in the contested case above.
- Count your staff in annual work units the way the EU Commission does, apprentices left out, and look at turnover and balance-sheet total. Are you under 10 people and at or under € 2 million on either figure?
- If you are in scope or unsure, have your specific case checked professionally. There is no blanket answer to this one.
The rest of this piece answers the second question. What does the site actually have to do?
What does “accessible” mean for a website, and what does it require?
Accessible means people with vision, hearing, motor, or cognitive impairments can use your site. The BaFG handles the technical side by reference. It sets out accessibility requirements and lets you meet them by applying the harmonised European standards whose references are published in the EU Official Journal, in full or in part, which gives you a presumption of conformity under § 5 BaFG.
The conformance levels live in that standard, EN 301 549, which is why the statute itself never names one. Since September 2026 it exists as v4.1.1, adopted on 24 August 2026, and that version brings in WCAG 2.2: clauses 9, 10 and 11 have all been realigned to it. The older v3.2.1 works from WCAG 2.1, it is the one WKO points to, and so far it is the only version whose reference sits in the Official Journal. Levels A and AA are the bar you clear by meeting the standard, in either version. WKO recommends working to WCAG 2.2 already. We build to A and AA and carry the 2.2 criteria with us, because that is where the standard has landed.
What the new version still lacks is its reference. V4.1.1 was prepared specifically for the European Accessibility Act, under the Commission’s standardisation request C(2022) 6456 final, and its new Annex ZB maps the requirements of Directive (EU) 2019/882 point by point. That annex is what v3.2.1 lacked. § 5 (1) BaFG ties the presumption of conformity to harmonised standards whose references have been published in the Official Journal of the European Union, and for Directive (EU) 2019/882 none is cited there as of 11 October 2026. The reference published in the Official Journal for v3.2.1 was made under Directive 2016/2102, the EU rules for public sector websites. The standard says so itself. Once it is cited in the Official Journal under Directive (EU) 2019/882, meeting the normative clauses listed in its clause A.2 confers a presumption of conformity, within the standard’s scope. The second route, the one § 5 (2) opens through technical specifications, is just as empty right now, because the Commission has adopted none for the Accessibility Act. Building to EN 301 549 stays the professionally correct bar and it is what we do. The statutory safe harbour arrives with the reference, and we keep this passage current.
Plenty of confident write-ups compress all of that into “the BaFG requires WCAG 2.1 AA”. That skips a step. The level arrives through the standard and the presumption of conformity, which is why it moves when the standard moves.
What matters for your week is what comes out at the end of that chain. It is five fundamentals, which between them account for most of what actually goes wrong on an ordinary business website, and none of them asks you to read a line of code. The next sections take them one at a time, with a self-test for each.
The five fundamentals of an accessible website, one at a time
1. Keyboard operation
Some people run a computer without a mouse. Anyone with a motor impairment, anyone using voice control or a switch device, anyone who is blind: for all of them the site runs through the keyboard, and whatever the keyboard cannot reach does not exist.
Your self-test: load your home page, click once into the browser address bar, then press the Tab key repeatedly. That walks you from one operable element to the next. Do you reach the menu and its sub-items, every link in the text, every form field and the submit button? And at each stop, can you see where you are?
That second half is the part most likely to disappear in a redesign. The element you have landed on needs a visible outline around it. Without one, someone working the page from the keyboard has no way of telling what pressing Enter is about to do. That indicator is part of the requirement, in the same way the operability itself is.
Here is what failure looks like in practice. Someone opens your menu from the keyboard, lands inside an overlay, and no key gets them out again. The only exit is closing the tab. The same thing happens regularly in cookie banners and image galleries.
2. Contrast
Pale grey body text on white looks fine on a good screen in a well-lit office. On a phone in sunlight, or through fifty-year-old eyes, it disappears. The contrast between text and background is a measurable ratio, and WCAG 2.1 at Level AA names specific ones: 4.5:1 for ordinary body text, and 3:1 for large text and for interface components and meaningful graphics.
Your self-test: go through the three places where this almost always breaks. Body text set in a light grey. Text sitting on top of a photograph. And buttons whose label is set in a pale brand colour. Getting the number needs no expertise: ask whoever built the site for the two colour values, and put them into one of the free contrast checkers on the web.
Contrast is at once the most common failure on the web and the cheapest one to repair. In most cases it is a change to two colour values in the design, made once and effective everywhere.
3. Real alt text
To a screen reader an image starts out as a blank. What gets read aloud is the text alternative stored behind it. And this is where the distinction most guidance skips splits into two cases.
| Type of image | What belongs behind it | What the visitor gets |
|---|---|---|
| An image that carries information (a chart, a product photo, a floor plan, a screenshot) | A description of what the image tells you | Someone who cannot see it receives the same information as everyone else |
| A purely decorative image (a background graphic, a mood shot beside text that already says it) | An explicitly empty text alternative, so the screen reader passes over it | The reading voice does not stop at every ornament |
Your self-test: go through the images on your most important pages and ask, for each one, what you would say if you had to describe it over the phone so the other person understood the page. That is the text. And where the honest answer is “nothing, it is decoration”, that is what belongs behind it.
Here is what failure looks like in practice. The text alternative reads “Bild1.jpg”, “photo”, or a filename straight out of a camera. An automated checker marks that as done, because something is stored. To the person at the other end it is worthless. This is the item on the list you are best placed to fix yourself, because you are the one who knows what the picture is doing there.
4. Labelled forms
A form field needs a label that stays visible and is connected to the field. The grey hint text inside the field does not do that job. It vanishes the moment someone starts typing, and then the person is looking at a filled-in box with no indication of what was supposed to go in it.
Your self-test: fill in your own contact form, slowly. As you type, does each field still show what belongs in it? Then submit it deliberately incomplete. Are you told in words what is missing and what to correct?
A red border is not an error message. Someone who does not see the border, or does not distinguish colours, learns nothing from it. The message has to be spelled out, near the field it concerns, and it should say what to do rather than only that something went wrong.
5. Captions on video
If your site carries a video with speech in it, it needs captions. That covers the brand film on the home page, the product explainer, and the clip embedded from a social channel.
Your self-test: turn the sound off and watch it. Do you follow what it is about?
This is the item most likely to be missing and most likely to cost real money. Alt text and contrast are a setting or a short piece of writing. Captions are produced work: someone has to transcribe the audio, set the timings, and proofread the result. If you have several videos, budget for it before it surprises you.
Structure and language
Two more things belong here, and neither is a design question, although both get treated as one.
Headings have to be real headings and run in order. Someone who cannot see the page jumps from heading to heading with a screen reader, the way you skim a page with your eyes. A paragraph that was only set larger and bold does not appear in that list, which takes away the scaffolding the person navigates by. A self-test with no tools: write out the headings of your most important page one under the other. Do they read as a sensible outline of the content?
Then there is the language of the page, which has to be declared so a reading voice pronounces German words in German. That is a one-time setting, and on a bilingual site it belongs on each language version.
Last, link text. A screen reader can list every link on a page. That list shows only the linked words, stripped of the sentence they sat in. “Click here” and “read more” produce an inventory with no information in it. Read your own link texts on their own and check that each one says where it goes.
What this actually costs
The honest split runs straight through the list above. Part of it is content and settings you can handle yourself in an afternoon. The rest sits in how the site is built, and that needs someone who can change the templates.
| You can do this yourself | Someone has to touch the build |
|---|---|
| Writing text alternatives for images and marking the decorative ones as decorative | The visible focus indicator for keyboard use |
| Rewriting link text so it makes sense on its own | Keyboard traps in menus, overlays and cookie banners |
| Obvious contrast failures inside content you maintain | Contrast that comes from the site’s colour scheme |
| Missing field labels in a form tool that has its own editor | Heading structure baked into the page template |
| Videos you commission or produce captions for | Error messages the form has to put into words |
We are deliberately not putting numbers on this, because without looking at the actual site they would be invented. The reliable statement is the split itself. The left column costs you time and nothing else. The right column is work that a maintained site already covers and that comes back as a change request under a finished one-off project.
A word on the overlay tools sold as a one-click fix. A script that sits on top of an existing site and adds a toolbar with font sizes and contrast switches does not produce conformance with the standard. The underlying failures stay exactly where they were, and disability organisations have been rejecting these widgets for years. One of these widgets costs money and clears none of the five items above.
The conformity information under § 14 (2) BaFG
If the law does reach you, a second duty comes with it, and it rarely gets mentioned in the same breath as the technical fixes. Under § 14 (2) BaFG you have to draw up the information listed in Annex 3 of the law and make it available to the public, in writing and orally, and in a form that is itself accessible to people with disabilities. You keep it for as long as you offer the service.
On the name, because nearly everyone gets this wrong: this is not the Erklärung zur Barrierefreiheit, colloquially the Barrierefreiheitserklärung. That instrument exists too. It sits in § 4 of the Web-Zugänglichkeits-Gesetz, which implements Directive 2016/2102 and binds federal and federally linked bodies, and it follows its own rules. The BaFG duty is comparable to it and is legally a different thing. Confusing the two sends you looking for the wrong template.
Annex 3 places the information in your general terms and conditions or a similar document, so the law prescribes no particular page. In practice a page of its own, permanently reachable and linked wherever your legal pages sit, has become the usual home for it. The elements Annex 3 names:
- a general description of the service in an accessible format
- the descriptions and explanations needed to understand how the service is carried out
- a description of how the service meets the relevant accessibility requirements
WKO is specific on one point: it should also document which parts of your site are not accessible, or only partly accessible, with a concrete reason for each of them. That is why this page cannot be a template filled in once. It describes where you stand, and where you stand changes.
If you are exempt as a microenterprise, the duty never arises at all. WKO puts it plainly: this information is needed only where the website falls within the scope of the BaFG.
Accessibility is a state, not a project
WKO’s own conclusion is the one worth carrying over. Accessibility on the web is better handled as a continuing process, in part because the technical standards keep developing, and because a service has to be re-evaluated against them at least once every five years. In the statute that five-year cycle sits somewhere narrower, in § 18 BaFG, which applies to businesses relying on the disproportionate-burden exemption. As a rule of thumb for everyone else it still holds.
In everyday work it breaks far faster than that anyway. A page that was clean in March has gaps again by September: the new team photo with no text alternative, the promotional banner in the pale brand colour, the embedded video with no captions, the new booking widget that did not arrive with keyboard support. Every one of those changes is harmless on its own and is made by someone who is just updating content.
Which puts the duty with whoever changes the website from week to week. That is the point where a one-off project contract stops covering anything: it ends at sign-off, and after that nobody owns the result. Accessibility has, for what it is worth, already come up unprompted from a client or a prospect on our side.
What to actually do next
If the three steps above tell you the law reaches you, this is the order:
- Work through the five fundamentals with the self-tests: the Tab key, contrast, text alternatives, forms, video. Write down what you find as you go.
- Sort your list into the two columns above. Whatever you can change yourself, change now, starting with the images.
- Hand the rest over in one batch to the person or team who work on the site. One batch is cheaper than five separate requests.
- Plan the § 14 (2) conformity information alongside the fixes. It is a separate deliverable and it is routinely forgotten.
- Decide who checks the site against this list after every content change. Without that, the other four undo themselves inside a year.
Why accessibility pays off even when you are exempt
Even where the law does not force you, there is a plain practical reason to do it anyway. The same flaws that stall a screen reader also block people who would have bought from you: missing labels, weak contrast, forms you can only complete with a mouse.
The state of the web is sobering. In the February 2026 WebAIM Million analysis, 95.9% of the top one million home pages had detectable WCAG 2 failures, averaging 56.1 errors per page. Low-contrast text alone showed up on 83.9% of home pages, up from 79.1% a year earlier. At that rate, broken accessibility is the norm, which is what makes getting it right a way to stand out.
Cleanly built, well-structured pages are also faster, easier to read, and easier for search engines to parse. It is the same build quality that keeps a site from being too slow.
What happens if you ignore it?
If you are in scope and do nothing, administrative fines are possible. The Sozialministeriumservice is the authority that imposes them. § 36 BaFG grades them by the kind of breach, and each band carries one lower ceiling that applies equally to small, medium-sized and micro companies.
| Breach | Maximum fine | Small, medium-sized and micro companies |
|---|---|---|
| Offering a service that does not meet the accessibility requirements | € 80.000 | € 50.000 |
| Failing to draw up the Annex 3 service information properly | € 40.000 | € 25.000 |
| Breaching other duties under the law, documentation and record-keeping among them | € 16.000 | € 10.000 |
The assessment weighs the scale of the breach, the number of people affected, and whether it happened before. In practice, though, the first step is rarely a fine.
The first year bears that out. The Österreichischer Behindertenrat reported in June 2026, citing figures from the Sozialministerium, that 84 proceedings had been opened since June 2025 and 48 reports checked, with 74 proceedings still open and a heavy concentration in banking. No administrative fines had been imposed at that point. The explanatory notes to the law also single out the principle of advising before penalising for a first or minor breach.
That takes the panic out of it. Proceedings are running and market surveillance is working through them, so if you are clearly in scope, handle it before a complaint arrives. None of this is legal advice, and if your own answer lands anywhere near the line, get advice on your specific case.
Who keeps it that way?
The point most people underestimate is the fifth one on the list above. Accessibility is exactly the invisible work that starts after launch and has no owner under a project contract. It also never appears in a quote, which is worth a thought before you sign one: we wrote up the questions nobody asks before ordering a website separately.
Accessibility does not stand on its own here. It sits alongside the other legal duties of a business website and general build quality, and both stay current only if someone maintains them. That is what our ongoing plans are for: under an ongoing plan this upkeep is part of the work. What a plan covers is on our plans page, and the usual questions are answered in the FAQ.