For the public sector
The statement is the obligation. Keeping it true is the work.
Public sector bodies did not have to wait for the European Accessibility Act. The Web Accessibility Directive (EU) 2016/2102 has required their websites and mobile applications to be accessible — and to carry a published, up-to-date accessibility statement — for years. Rampsight generates that statement, hosts it at a public link, and re-scans the site every week so the status you declared stays the status that is true.
14-day free trial, no credit card. Reports and statements carry your organisation's brand, not ours.
A separate law, in force well before the EAA
If you work with municipalities, universities, hospitals, transport operators or any other body governed by public law, the rules that apply to them are older and more specific than the ones a shop is now facing.
Directive (EU) 2016/2102
The Web Accessibility Directive requires the websites and mobile applications of public sector bodies to be perceivable, operable, understandable and robust. In practice that is measured against EN 301 549, the European standard that references WCAG level AA.
A published accessibility statement
Not optional, and not a footer sentence. Every site in scope must carry a detailed statement following the EU model: the conformance status, the content that is not accessible and why, how the statement was prepared, and how a member of the public gives feedback.
Kept current, not filed once
A statement is a claim about the site as it is now. It has to be reviewed and updated as the site changes — which is the part that quietly rots, because nobody is watching the site between reviews.
Monitored by the member state
National bodies sample public sector sites and report to the Commission. Being on that list with a statement that no longer matches the site is a worse position than having a statement that honestly declares what is broken.
The EAA sits alongside it
The European Accessibility Act has not replaced any of this. A public body that also sells consumer services online can be dealing with both, and the underlying technical requirement — WCAG level AA — is the same one.
Procurement notices ask for it
Increasingly the tender documents do too. Being able to show a dated monitoring record and a maintained statement is a concrete answer to a question that many bidders can only answer with an intention.
The statement generator, in detail
This is the piece of the product built for exactly this obligation. It follows the harmonised EU model statement — Commission Implementing Decision (EU) 2018/1523 — and it is the same generator the sample on this site is produced with.
What it produces
- Included: The commitment statement naming the body and the site
- Included: A conformance status: fully, partially or not conformant
- Included: The non-accessible content, as a list you write and control
- Included: How the statement was prepared, with the review date
- Included: Feedback and contact details for the public
- Included: English, German, French or Portuguese, chosen per agency
- Included: A public link you control, published when you say so
- Included: A print-ready page, so it can also go out as a document
How it stays true
The weekly scan is what keeps the statement honest between reviews. When a score drops or a new rule starts failing, you are emailed — and the list of non-accessible content you declared is the thing to revisit. Editing a published statement updates the public page as soon as you save, so there is never a stale copy sitting at the old URL.
The wording is deliberately cautious. It describes an assessed status prepared by a self-assessment supported by automated testing, and it never claims certification. Read a complete generated statement.
What this does not replace
Read this part before you put Rampsight in a tender response. Public sector accessibility is one of the few areas where the law is explicit that automated tools are not enough, and we would rather you knew that from us.
The monitoring methodology national bodies apply under the Directive — set out in Commission Implementing Decision (EU) 2018/1524 — deliberately combines two things: a simplified check across a large number of sites, which automated tooling can carry, and an in-depth evaluation of a smaller sample, which is manual expert work. The in-depth part covers the criteria a machine cannot reach: whether the site can be operated end to end with a keyboard, whether a screen reader can complete a real task, whether alternative text actually describes the image, whether error messages make sense.
Rampsight covers the first kind of testing well and does not attempt the second. Several member states also require the statement to be backed by an evaluation carried out or reviewed by people with accessibility expertise, and some prescribe additional national elements in the statement itself — a link to the enforcement procedure, a reference to the national transposing law, or a fixed publication location. The document our generator produces follows the EU model’s core sections; check it against your country’s template and add what your national rules require.
What we do is make the recurring half of the work cheap and automatic, so the expert hours — which are the expensive, genuinely scarce part — go to the questions that need a human.
We do
- Included: Crawl and test up to 1000 pages per scan on Scale, every week
- Included: Test with axe-core against WCAG 2.2 levels A and AA
- Included: Locate each failure: page, CSS selector, element and fix guidance
- Included: Generate and host the accessibility statement in four languages
- Included: Keep a dated history of the last 12 scans per site
We do not
- Not included: Perform the in-depth manual evaluation the methodology expects
- Not included: Test with assistive technologies or with disabled users
- Not included: Certify conformance, or sign off a conformity assessment
- Not included: Provide the feedback mechanism or the enforcement procedure itself
- Not included: Give legal advice on your national transposition
How it fits a public sector engagement
Monitoring underneath, expert review on top, and a statement that reflects both.
1
Establish the baseline
Add the site and run the first scan. You get a grade, a located list of machine-detectable failures and the pages they live on — the factual basis a manual review can start from instead of repeating.
2
Write the statement honestly
Declare the conformance status you can actually defend, and list the non-accessible content — the scan findings you have not cleared yet, plus whatever the expert review turned up. Publish it at the link the body puts in its footer.
3
Keep it alive
The weekly scan watches for regressions between reviews and emails you when the score drops. When the review date comes round, the history chart is your evidence of what changed and when.
Questions from public sector work
- Can we say the site is compliant because the scan is clean?
No. A clean scan means no machine-detectable WCAG failures were found on the crawled pages — a real result, and not the same as conformance. Our reports state this in writing, and the statement generator will not produce a claim we cannot stand behind.
- Does the statement have to be in our language?
It has to be usable by the people it is written for, so in practice yes. Statements are generated in English, German, French or Portuguese, chosen per agency, and that setting is separate from the language each of your team uses in the dashboard.
- Who can see the published statement?
Anybody with the link — it is a public page, meant to be found and linked from the site's footer, and search engines are allowed to index it. The report is the opposite: a private link protected by a signed token, and never indexed.
- Can it be served from our own domain?
Yes. Point a subdomain at us with one CNAME record and both the statement and the reports are served from your domain. Our product name appears nowhere on either page.
- What about intranets and systems behind a login?
The crawler is anonymous and same-origin: it starts at the site's home page and follows public links, up to your plan's budget of 100 to 1000 pages per scan. It never signs in, and it refuses private and loopback addresses outright, so an internal system is out of reach by design.
- How does this relate to EN 301 549?
We run the axe-core rules tagged for WCAG 2.2 levels A and AA — a superset of the WCAG 2.1 AA baseline that EN 301 549 references for web content. The standard also covers requirements outside a web page, such as documents and hardware, which no page scanner evaluates. WCAG 2.2 explained.
Start with the site and the statement
Add a public sector site, run a scan and generate the statement from the result. 14 days free, no credit card, and nothing is published until you publish it.