Making Corporate Websites Accessible

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, but the trend is clear: the EU Web Accessibility Directive already obligates public bodies, and national legislators continuously expand the circle of obligated entities.

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, 2024). It improves search engine visibility because semantic HTML and structured content are exactly what crawlers evaluate. It reduces bounce rates because all users find and understand content more easily. And it positions 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 most 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.

Navigation is the most frequent interaction point on a corporate website. Main menu, submenus, breadcrumbs, footer navigation and language-specific menus must be operable for all users. A mega menu that only opens on mouse hover is invisible to keyboard users. A hamburger menu without aria-expanded attribute does not tell screen reader users whether it is open or closed.

We implement menus following WAI-ARIA Authoring Practices: menu items are reachable via Tab, submenus open with Enter or Arrow Down and close with Escape. Focus moves to the first entry when a submenu opens and returns to the triggering menu item when it closes. Mobile menus receive aria-expanded, aria-controls and role attributes. Skip links at the page start enable keyboard users to bypass navigation.

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 must be pausable and may only perform automatic content changes with user confirmation.

Corporate websites exhibit different barrier patterns than online shops. The most common problems are: missing or meaningless alt texts for images, particularly 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 typical weaknesses and deliver concrete solution proposals that your development team or agency can implement directly.

Accessibility and SEO overlap in many areas: semantic HTML, correct heading structures, descriptive link texts and alt texts are relevant for both screen readers and search engine crawlers. An accessible website is therefore almost always a search-engine-friendly website. Our optimizations improve not only accessibility but typically have a positive effect on organic visibility. We leverage this dual effect strategically: every accessibility measure is also evaluated and prioritized from an SEO perspective, so you achieve two goals simultaneously with one investment.

For companies wanting to keep their website accessible long-term, we offer training for editors and developers. We impart practical knowledge: how are alt texts correctly formulated? What heading structure is semantically correct? How do you design accessible forms and navigation? This knowledge enables your team to create new content accessibly from the start rather than having to fix barriers retroactively.

For ongoing projects, we offer compliance monitoring: automated checks detect new barriers introduced by content updates or design changes, and regular manual spot checks ensure that achieved conformance is permanently maintained.

Accessibility is not a one-time measure but an ongoing process. New content, design updates and technical changes can introduce new barriers at any time. Our monitoring solution automatically detects such regressions and enables quick correction before users or testing bodies notice the barrier.