The BFSG: the Accessibility Act in Germany

What the BFSG is

The Barrierefreiheitsstärkungsgesetz (BFSG, literally the “Accessibility Strengthening Act”) is the German statute that implements Directive (EU) 2019/882, the European Accessibility Act. It has been in force since 28 June 2025.

The substance comes from the directive, so the scope, the technical target and the microenterprise exemption look the same as they do elsewhere in the EU. What is specifically German is the enforcement: who watches, what they can order, how large the fine is, and who else — besides the authority — is allowed to act.

If you have not read the European layer yet, start there: what the European Accessibility Act requires.

Who is in scope

The BFSG follows the directive’s list of services sold to consumers: e-commerce, consumer banking, e-books, electronic communications, passenger transport services, and access to audiovisual media services. For an agency portfolio, e-commerce is the category that matters: if a consumer can buy something on the site, assume it is in scope until someone qualified says otherwise.

Being established outside Germany does not help. The act follows the market: a business selling to consumers in the EU is bound wherever it is registered.

The technical target is the harmonised standard EN 301 549, which for web content points at WCAG level AA — currently the WCAG 2.1 AA criteria. What that means concretely.

The borderline: a purely informational website

This is the question German agencies ask first, and it has a usable answer. A website that only presents information — no form, no booking, no transaction — can fall outside the scope of the BFSG. What brings a site back into scope is the ability to do something on it:

• a contact form,
• a booking or appointment function,
• a download,
• and, obviously, anything a consumer can buy.

In practice almost every business website has at least one of those. A restaurant with a reservation widget, a clinic with an appointment form, a manufacturer with a PDF datasheet to download — each of those is on the wrong side of the line for a client who assumed a brochure site was safe.

Two cautions. First, whether a specific site is in or out is a legal judgement about that site, not something a scanner decides. Second, the borderline is a poor place to build a strategy: a site can cross it with one new feature, and the fix is far cheaper when accessibility was designed in rather than retrofitted after a complaint.

The microenterprise exemption

The BFSG mirrors the directive. A Kleinstunternehmen (microenterprise) providing services is exempt when it has:

• fewer than 10 people, and
• an annual turnover or balance sheet total of €2 million or less.

Both conditions must hold, and the exemption covers services only — it does not exempt products. A three-person company that puts a physical product covered by the act on the market is not carried out of scope by its size.

Fines up to €100,000

Germany sets the ceiling for a Bußgeld (administrative fine) at €100,000. That is a maximum, not a tariff. The amount depends on:

• the severity of the violation,
• whether it was intentional or negligent,
• and the size of the company.

The more immediate risk is usually not the money. The authority can order that a service stop being offered until it is made accessible. For an online shop, a suspension order is a different order of magnitude from a fine, and it is the sentence worth reading out on a client call.

Who enforces it: the MLBF

Market surveillance under the BFSG belongs to the Länder — the federal states — rather than to a single federal agency. Instead of sixteen separate offices, the states set up a joint body by state treaty:

Marktüberwachungsstelle der Länder für die Barrierefreiheit von Produkten und Dienstleistungen (MLBF) — the Market Surveillance Body of the Federal States for the Accessibility of Products and Services, based in Magdeburg.

The MLBF is the address a complaint about an inaccessible service reaches, and the body that can require a provider to fix the service or stop offering it.

The Abmahnung risk: your competitors can act too

This is the German specific that catches agencies by surprise. Enforcement is not only the authority’s job: competitors and qualified trade associations can issue an Abmahnung — a formal cease-and-desist notice.

Practically, that means a client’s exposure does not depend on a regulator noticing them. It depends on any competitor deciding that an inaccessible checkout is worth a letter. German businesses know this pattern well from other areas of law: the notices arrive in waves, they carry costs, and they arrive faster than any authority would.

For an agency, this changes the sales conversation. The honest framing is not “you will be fined” — it is that in Germany the timeline is not under your client’s control.

What an agency should do for its clients

1. Sort the portfolio. Which German clients sell to consumers? Which of the remaining sites have a form, a booking function or a download? Which clients are genuinely microenterprises providing services?
2. Baseline every site in scope. A scan gives you a score and a list of located failures — the page, the element, the fix. That is what a developer can work from, and what a client can budget against.
3. Fix in the code, by severity and reach. A failure in a shared template or component is worth more than a one-off. Fix the design system, not the symptom.
4. Add the human pass. Keyboard operation, screen reader behaviour, whether alternative text says anything useful. Automated checks do not reach these.
5. Publish an accessibility statement saying where the site stands, what is not fixed, and how to report a barrier. What it must contain.
6. Keep scanning. A release can undo a month of fixes. Scheduled scans of 100 to 1000 pages per site, depending on the plan, tell you in the same week, not at the next audit.

Rampsight produces reports and statements in German under your agency’s brand — your logo, your colours, optionally your own domain from the Agency plan up. Your client never sees our name. How agencies package this as a retainer.

What a scan can and cannot prove

Do not tell a German client that a tool has made them barrierefrei. No automated scan can support that sentence, and it is the kind of claim that reads badly in a letter from somebody else’s lawyer.