Compliance guides
The accessibility rules your clients are asking about
Four short guides, written for the person who has to explain this to a client on a call: what the law actually asks for, who it applies to, what the technical standard means in practice, and what an agency can do about it. No scare tactics, no invented numbers.
Information for agencies and their clients — not legal advice.
The four guides
Read them in any order. The EAA is the law, WCAG is the yardstick it points at, the BFSG is how one member state enforces it, and the accessibility statement is the document your client publishes at the end.
- Applies since 28 June 2025
- Standard: EN 301 549 → WCAG AA
- Penalties set by each member state
- Microenterprise exemption for services
European Accessibility Act
Directive (EU) 2019/882 has applied since 28 June 2025 to services sold to consumers in the EU — e-commerce, consumer banking, e-books, electronic communications, passenger transport and access to audiovisual media services. It binds any business selling to EU consumers, wherever that business is established. The guide covers scope, the microenterprise exemption, the transition period for products, and why penalties differ from country to country.
BFSG — the act in Germany
The Barrierefreiheitsstärkungsgesetz is Germany’s implementation, in force since 28 June 2025. Fines reach €100,000, market surveillance sits with a joint body of the federal states, and competitors can send a cease-and-desist notice of their own. The guide also covers the borderline case German agencies ask about most: the purely informational website.
WCAG 2.2, explained for agencies
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines are the technical yardstick behind every rule on this page. The guide covers the four principles, what levels A and AA mean, how versions 2.0, 2.1 and 2.2 relate, which success criteria an automated tool can and cannot check, and the failures that turn up on ordinary business websites again and again.
Accessibility statements
The public document that says how accessible a site is, what is not accessible yet, and how to complain about it. The guide covers who has to publish one, what the EU model requires section by section, and how Rampsight generates and hosts one in English, German, French and Portuguese under your agency's brand.
Where monitoring fits
None of these rules asks for a certificate. They ask for a site that works for disabled users, and for evidence that someone is looking after it.
Find the failures
A scan crawls up to 100 to 1000 pages of a site — your plan sets the budget — with a real browser, and tests each one against the WCAG 2.2 A and AA rules. Every failure names the pages it appears on, the element and how to fix it.
Show the trend
A one-off audit is out of date after the next release. Scheduled scans give your client a score over time and tell you when a deployment introduced a new barrier — which is the thing a regulator or a customer actually asks about.
Publish the statement
When the fixes are in, generate the accessibility statement and host it on a public link that stays in step with the site. What a statement must contain.
Before you quote any of this to a client
What this page is, and what it is not
Automated testing finds a real but partial share of the WCAG success criteria. Whole families of requirements — whether alternative text actually describes the image, whether a custom widget can be driven with a keyboard and announced sensibly, whether an error message helps — can only be judged by a person. No automated tool can prove conformance, and Rampsight never certifies, guarantees or ensures it. What a scan gives you is evidence: located failures, tracked over time, that you can hand to a developer.
This page is information for web agencies and their clients, written in plain language. It is not legal advice. For a binding view of your own obligations, ask a lawyer qualified in the country where your client sells.
Turn the rules into a service you can sell
Add a client site, run the first scan, and send a report under your own brand the same day. 14 days free, no credit card.