Directive (EU) 2016/2102 · Decision (EU) 2018/1523
Accessibility statements
The accessibility statement is the public document that says how accessible a site is, what is not accessible yet, and what a visitor can do about it. It is the smallest visible piece of accessibility work, it is the first thing an enforcement body looks for, and it is the deliverable an agency can hand over the same week.
Information for agencies and their clients — not legal advice.
What a statement is
An accessibility statement is a page on the website that answers four questions in public: how accessible is this site, measured against what; what is not accessible; how do I tell you about a barrier; and what do I do if you ignore me.
It is not a certificate and not a badge. A good statement admits things. That is the point of it: a statement that claims perfection is either untrue or untested, and both are worse than an honest “partially conformant, here is the list, here is the plan”.
For an agency it is also the cheapest piece of visible value in the whole engagement. The scan produces the evidence, the statement turns that evidence into something the client can publish.
Who has to publish one
The obligation in its strict, regulated form comes from the Web Accessibility Directive, (EU) 2016/2102. It applies to the websites and mobile applications of public sector bodies, it was in force well before the European Accessibility Act, and it is the directive that requires a published accessibility statement, kept up to date. The template everybody follows is the model in Commission Implementing Decision (EU) 2018/1523.
So: public sector bodies must publish a statement in that form. If your client is a municipality, a school, a hospital or a public agency, this is not optional and the model is prescribed. How public sector organisations use monitoring.
Private companies in scope of the European Accessibility Act are in a slightly different position. The EAA does not impose the Web Accessibility Directive’s statement form on them; what it does require is that service providers make information available to the public about the service they offer and how it meets the accessibility requirements. A statement written to the 2018/1523 model is the established, recognisable way to do that, which is why it has become normal practice for private sites too.
Even where nothing compels it, publishing one is worth doing. It gives disabled users a route that is not a lawsuit, it gives a buyer in a tender the answer they were going to ask for anyway, and it gives your client a dated record that they were working on this before anyone complained.
What a statement must contain
Five parts, in the EU model. A statement missing any of them is incomplete, and the two most often missing are the last two.
| Required part | What it has to say |
|---|---|
| Conformance status | Whether the site fully conforms, partially conforms, or does not conform to the standard it is measured against — for web content in the EU, EN 301 549 and WCAG at level AA. “Partially conformant” is a normal, respectable answer, and it is the honest one for most sites. |
| Non-accessible content | The specific parts that are not accessible, and why — a known failure being worked on, content outside the scope of the rules, or something the provider argues is a disproportionate burden. Each reason is stated separately, with the barrier described in terms a user can recognise. |
| Feedback mechanism | How somebody who hits a barrier tells you about it, and asks for the information in an accessible form. In practice: a named contact, an address that reaches a person, and a realistic response time. |
| Enforcement procedure | What a user can do if the feedback goes unanswered or the answer is unsatisfactory — the route to the national enforcement body. This is the part organisations most often leave out, and the part a complaint is judged on. |
| Preparation date and method | When the statement was prepared or last reviewed, and how the assessment was made — self-assessment, a third-party evaluation, or a combination. A statement with no date is a statement nobody can rely on. |
Keeping it current
The Web Accessibility Directive does not just require a statement; it requires one that is kept up to date. That is the part that quietly fails. A statement prepared once, listing three known limitations that were fixed a year ago and none of the two that appeared since, is worse than useless — it is a dated, public, signed record of an assessment nobody repeated.
Practically, a statement needs a review whenever the site changes materially, and on a schedule regardless. That is a maintenance job, and maintenance jobs need a trigger. Ours is the scan: when a scheduled scan finds a new failure, that is the signal that the list of known limitations has moved.
Wording it honestly
A few rules that keep a statement defensible:
- Never write “certified” or “guaranteed”. Nobody certifies a website through automated testing, and a claim like that is exactly what gets quoted back at you.
- Name the standard and the version you measured against, so the claim means something.
- Say how you assessed it. Self-assessment with an automated tool is a legitimate method; pretending it was an independent audit is not.
- Describe barriers in user terms, not rule ids. A visitor reading the statement wants to know that the video player has no captions, not that
color-contrastfailed on 14 nodes. - Give a contact that a person reads, and a response time you can keep.
- Date it. Every time.
Our own statement follows the same rules, if you want to see what this looks like in practice: the Rampsight accessibility statement.
Generated and hosted for you
Rampsight generates the statement from the scan data and hosts it, so your client has a public URL rather than a Word document somebody has to paste into a CMS.
- Four languages. English, German, French and Portuguese — the whole document, not a translated heading over English body text.
- Your brand, not ours. The hosted statement carries the agency’s name and branding, and can be served from your own domain on the Agency and Scale plans. The word Rampsight does not appear on it.
- All five required parts. Conformance status, known limitations, the feedback contact, the enforcement route, and the preparation date, which you set when you review it.
- Referenced to EN 301 549 and WCAG AA, the standard the EU rules actually point at.
- Worded to never claim certification. The generator has no wording for “guaranteed” because we did not write one.
- Editable and re-publishable. Change the limitations after a round of fixes, save, and the public page updates.
What a scan can and cannot prove
A statement is a claim your client is making in public, so it has to be one they can stand behind. Automated results are evidence for it; they are not the whole of it, and the assessment method section should say so.
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.
Publish a statement your client can stand behind
Scan the site, review the known limitations, and publish the statement on a hosted link under your own brand — in English, German, French or Portuguese. 14 days free, no credit card required.