Accessible Corporate Website per WCAG 2.2 and BFSG

Whether a corporate website falls under the BFSG depends on whether it offers services in electronic commerce. A purely informational offering without transaction capability is not directly affected at present. The circle of obligated entities has grown, however: the EU Web Accessibility Directive obligates public bodies, and since 28 June 2025 the BFSG has also set accessibility requirements for private providers of certain products and services.

Independent of legal obligation, strong business arguments exist: an accessible corporate website reaches the target group of approximately 7.8 million severely disabled people in Germany (Source: Federal Statistical Office, 2026). It can improve search engine visibility because semantic HTML and structured content are exactly what crawlers evaluate. It can reduce bounce rates because all users find and understand content more easily. And it can position your company as a responsible employer, increasingly relevant in the competition for talent.

Accessibility starts with structure. A sighted user recognizes page organization through font sizes, spacing and visual hierarchy. A blind user depends on semantic markup in HTML: H1 for the main heading, H2 for main sections, H3 for subsections. Landmarks like nav, main, aside and footer enable quick navigation to specific page areas. Lists as ul/ol, tables as table with correct thead and th, quotes as blockquote. These HTML elements are not new, but they are not correctly used on many corporate websites.

We revise the semantic structure of your website without changing the visual design. The heading hierarchy is cleaned up, landmarks are inserted, lists and tables are correctly marked up, and interactive elements receive appropriate ARIA roles. The result: screen reader users can navigate the page, get an overview and jump directly to desired content, exactly as sighted users do visually.

The contact form is the most important conversion point on many corporate websites. An inaccessible form means potential customers cannot contact your company. We ensure every input field has a visible and programmatically linked label, required fields are marked via aria-required and visual hint, error messages are linked to the respective field and focused when they appear. Placeholder texts do not replace labels because they disappear on input start and lose context.

Beyond that, we check all interactive elements for keyboard accessibility: accordions must open with Enter/Space and close with Escape. Tab panels must be navigable with arrow keys. Lightboxes must trap focus and return it on close. Sliders and carousels that change automatically must offer a way to pause, stop or hide them.

In many cases, no rebuild is needed. We retrofit your existing corporate website in its current code without touching the familiar look and feel. Typical barrier patterns differ from those of an online shop: missing or meaningless alt texts for team photos and infographics, inadequate heading structures that make navigation difficult for screen reader users, inaccessible contact forms without correct label association and error messages, and slider and carousel elements that cannot be controlled via keyboard. Our audits systematically uncover these weaknesses and deliver concrete solution proposals that your development team or agency can implement directly, or that we realize ourselves on request.