Accessibility Act 2026: Who Actually Needs an Accessible Site

Most of the websites currently being sold an accessibility obligation do not have one. Germany's Barrierefreiheitsstärkungsgesetz, the national implementation of the European Accessibility Act, has applied since 28 June 2025, and ever since, warning emails have been landing with clinics, trades businesses and consultancies whose sites simply are not covered. That is worse than annoying: it buries the only question that matters, which is who is genuinely caught and what follows from it.

The act regulates services, not web presences

The German accessibility act transposes the European Accessibility Act into national law. It names a closed list of products and services: consumer banking, telecoms, e-books, passenger transport, certain media services and, for the vast majority of businesses the only relevant category, services provided in electronic commerce.

Two limitations are already built into that list. First, the law governs the relationship with consumers. Sell exclusively to businesses and you are not covered. Second, there is no general duty to "make the website accessible". There is a duty attached to a specific service that happens to be delivered through a website.

Keep this separate from BITV 2.0, which applies to public bodies and rests on Germany's disability equality act. Technically both point at the same European standard, EN 301 549. The legal basis is different, though, and a private business presented with BITV requirements is entitled to ask what exactly they are grounded in.

The clause that decides everything

The act defines services in electronic commerce as telemedia services offered through websites or apps and provided electronically, at a consumer's individual request, "with a view to concluding a consumer contract".

That final clause carries the entire distinction. Where a consumer concludes a contract on your site - ordering goods, booking a room, buying a ticket, taking out a subscription - the service is covered. Where your site describes what you do and the contract is then formed by phone, by email or in person, it is not, on the reading published by Germany's federal accessibility body. Its FAQ states explicitly that purely informational offerings without a contract function sit outside the scope. That is precisely the sentence missing from the fear marketing of recent months.

The two "probably" rows are deliberate. The boundary between initiating and concluding a contract has not been settled, and anyone promising you certainty here is overreaching. We deliver the technical implementation; the legal assessment of your specific case belongs with a solicitor.

The micro-enterprise exemption is narrower than it sounds

Micro-enterprises are exempt from the service requirements. That means fewer than ten people employed and annual turnover or a balance sheet total of at most two million euros. Three points routinely get lost.

• Both thresholds count: twelve part-time staff means you are not a micro-enterprise, however modest the turnover
• The exemption covers services only. Place products on the market and you are caught regardless of size
• It attaches to the business, not the website. Grow past the threshold and the exemption goes with it

Read the other way round: for a large share of small clinics, studios and workshops the exemption genuinely applies. We say that plainly because part of the market has a commercial interest in not saying it.

What applies if you are covered

Technically the route runs through EN 301 549, whose web chapter refers to WCAG at levels A and AA. In practice that means WCAG 2.1 AA today, with a revision pointing at 2.2 on the horizon. Anyone building new today sensibly targets 2.2 straight away, because the extra work over 2.1 is small. What that means in code is set out in building an accessible website.

There is also an information duty: covered providers must explain how their service meets the requirements, and that explanation must itself be accessible. A narrow transitional rule lets service providers keep using products they had lawfully deployed before 28 June 2025 until 27 June 2030. That is not a general amnesty for old websites. Finally, disproportionate burden can be invoked, but only when documented and notified to the market surveillance authority. It is a procedure, not a free pass.

For hotels with their own booking engine, for online shops and for clinics taking appointments, none of this is academic. How a hotel website should be built and what a dental practice site has to deliver we cover separately.

Who enforces it, and what the warning-letter story is worth

Enforcement sits with a joint market surveillance authority of the sixteen federal states, based in Magdeburg. The process is tiered: first a request to remedy the defect within a reasonable period, then restriction or prohibition of the service, with fines last. Consumers and recognised associations can prompt the authority to act.

What you will struggle to find evidence for is the much-invoked wave of warning letters. There are reports of them, and there are specialist lawyers who consider many of them vulnerable, not least because sender and recipient are frequently not competitors at all. Whether a breach of the act even engages competition law has not been settled by the courts. Anyone painting a certain warning letter on the wall today is selling a forecast as a fact.

Concrete steps for the next 90 days

• Days 1-30: answer one question - is a consumer contract concluded on your site? If not, accessibility is a quality question for you, not a legal one
• Days 1-30: check headcount and turnover against the micro-enterprise thresholds and record the result with a date
• Days 31-60: if covered, test the contract journey against WCAG 2.1 AA, starting with keyboard operation, contrast and forms
• Days 31-60: have genuine borderline cases assessed by a solicitor rather than decided from blog posts
• Days 61-90: fix what you found and publish your accessibility statement

Conclusion

The act is neither a reason to panic nor a reason to look away. It hits clearly defined cases hard and leaves a great many websites untouched. If you are covered, you have a technical brief against a known standard, laid out step by step in building an accessible website. If you are not, the choice is yours - and the cost and benefit of accessibility sets out the arithmetic that decision rests on.