A company reworks its online shop because the German Accessibility Act has applied to consumer services since 28 June 2025 (Federal Ministry of Justice). A few months later an employee reports that she can no longer submit a leave request in the new HR portal: the field for the return date is only marked in colour when it is missing, and the screen reader never learns about it. The audit stopped at the factory gate; the duty did not. This article separates the two legal circles that meet here and shows what an audit scope looks like once it includes the intranet, self-service and time tracking.
Key takeaways
- The BFSG binds services only in so far as they are provided to consumers (Federal Ministry of Justice). A staff intranet therefore falls outside its scope.
- For federal public bodies, section 12a BGG names the intranet explicitly; for electronically supported administrative procedures the deadline expired on 23 June 2021 (Federal Ministry of Justice).
- Private employers are bound by social law instead: the workplace must be equipped with the necessary technical work aids (Federal Ministry of Justice).
- Around 1.14 million people with severe disabilities work for employers with 20 or more workplaces (Federal Employment Agency, 2026).
- An equipment claim under section 164 SGB IX that is ignored must first be met; separate from it stands compensation under section 15 AGG (Federal Ministry of Justice), which concerns discrimination in the recruitment procedure alone and must be asserted within two months.
- Costs for technical work aids can be covered in full (Federal Ministry of Justice). That shifts the line at which an adaptation counts as unreasonable.
Why the BFSG stops at the factory gate
The scope sits in the very first section: the act applies to certain services provided to consumers after 28 June 2025 (Federal Ministry of Justice). The second section supplies the legal definition, and it is narrow: a consumer is a natural person who receives a product or service for purposes that are predominantly outside their trade or self-employed professional activity (Federal Ministry of Justice). Anyone clocking in on a time tracking system in the morning is acting in exactly that professional capacity. The internal system is therefore not a consumer service, and the BFSG does not apply. The same logic carries the service category that many portals would otherwise fall under: electronic commerce presupposes a contract concluded with a consumer (Federal Ministry of Justice), and no such contract exists between employer and workforce inside an intranet. How far the boundary reaches in a given case depends on the offering, not on the server: a customer portal remains a customer portal even when staff operate it.
A second relief comes from the same direction and is frequently misread. Microenterprises with fewer than ten people and an annual turnover or balance sheet total of at most two million euros (Federal Ministry of Justice) are exempt from the service obligations; our article on the microenterprise exemption takes the thresholds apart. The fine regime that so often appears in slide decks as leverage hangs on the same boundary: the act provides for up to one hundred thousand euros (Federal Ministry of Justice), but for consumer products and services. Market surveillance will not act on an inaccessible HR portal. Anyone who wants the enforcement routes in detail will find them in our overview of enforcement and legal risk; the requirements for outward-facing services are summarised on the page about the BFSG requirements.
The most common wrong conclusion
The second track: employer duties under social law
The obligation that binds internal systems sits in Book Nine of the Social Code. People with severe disabilities have a claim against their employer to have their workplace equipped with the necessary technical work aids (Federal Ministry of Justice). The wording comes from a time when that meant lifting equipment; in most office roles today the technical work aid is the software itself. A screen reader helps little if the HR self-service form returns its error messages as a red outline and nothing else. The claim has an international law flank: the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities requires that reasonable accommodation is provided in the workplace (German Institute for Human Rights). If it is ignored, the employer first owes performance of the claim itself. A second risk sits alongside it and follows a different provision: on a failure to hire in a recruitment procedure, compensation may reach three monthly salaries (Federal Ministry of Justice) where the person would not have been hired even in a selection free of discrimination; without that condition the cap does not apply. Such a claim must be asserted in writing within two months (Federal Ministry of Justice).
That outlines the group of organisations where the topic is almost certainly already concrete. Employers with an annual monthly average of at least 20 workplaces must employ people with severe disabilities in at least 5 percent of those places (Federal Ministry of Justice). Once five people with severe disabilities are employed on a more than temporary basis, a representative body is elected (Federal Ministry of Justice); in procurement, that body is the natural counterpart long before a contract is signed. And anyone unable to work for more than six weeks (Federal Ministry of Justice) within a year is entitled to occupational integration management, where barriers in internal systems regularly surface first, because they stand in the way of a return to the previous workplace.
Intranet home page
News, search, form directory. The entry point decides whether the rest is reachable at all. Heading structure and landmarks carry half the navigation here.
HR self-service
Leave requests, sick notes, payslips, master data. Forms need real labels and error messages in text, not only in colour.
Time tracking
Clock in, clock out, correction request. Often a separate third-party system with its own interaction model that never appears in a website audit scope.
Learning platform
Mandatory training with time limits, videos without captions, tests built on drag and drop. Failing here costs not only knowledge but a required record.
Ticketing and approvals
Purchase requests, IT incidents, travel expense approvals. Status changes are frequently reloaded without any announcement to assistive technology.
Document storage
Policies, works agreements, minutes. An untagged PDF is a picture to a speech output, no matter how tidy the folder structure looks.
The claim is not unlimited. It does not exist in so far as meeting it would be unreasonable for the employer or involve disproportionate expenditure (Federal Ministry of Justice). In practice that line is often drawn too early, for a simple reason: it is calculated without the funding that sits next to it. How the weighing is documented when it genuinely holds is shown in the article on disproportionate burden; the burden-of-proof logic there transfers to the employment law assessment, even though the underlying norm is a different one.
Public bodies: here the intranet is named in the law
In federal law, only section 12a BGG names internal services explicitly. Federal public bodies design their websites and mobile applications to be accessible, including the services intended for employees on the intranet (Federal Ministry of Justice). The wording leaves no room for interpretation, and it has a twin for specialist procedures: step by step, and at the latest by 23 June 2021 (Federal Ministry of Justice), electronically supported administrative procedures including electronic case processing and record keeping had to be made accessible. At state level the state equality acts carry the same line: Article 14 BayBGG, headed accessible internet and intranet, requires public authorities to design their internet and intranet presences and services step by step so that people with disabilities can in principle use them without restriction (Bavarian State Chancellery). Anyone working for the public sector or bidding in tenders will find the practical side of this on our page for the public sector and in the article on public procurement.
The implementing regulation draws the same circle once more, and tighter. Electronically supported administrative procedures with and within the administration must be made accessible and usable (Federal Ministry of Justice) — „within“ is the decisive word here. At European level the picture differs: the directive on the accessibility of public sector websites excludes intranet and extranet content published before 23 September 2019 (EUR-Lex) until such websites undergo a substantial revision. The European legislator knew about the gap and put it up for decision: member states should have the option of extending application to intranet and extranet services used at the workplace (EUR-Lex). Germany did exactly that for the federal level. How far the public sector actually gets is measured by the federal monitoring body: in the second reporting period 7,239 websites (Federal Monitoring Body, 2025) were reviewed, alongside 269 apps (Federal Monitoring Body, 2025).
| Question | Federal public body | Private company |
|---|---|---|
| Does a norm name the intranet? | Yes, section 12a paragraph 1 sentence 1 BGG | No, no provision names it explicitly |
| Where does the duty come from? | BGG and BITV 2.0, objective duty of the body | SGB IX, individual claim of the employed person |
| Who enforces it? | Monitoring body, conciliation body, supervision | The affected person before an employment tribunal |
| Is there a fixed deadline? | Yes, 23 June 2021 for administrative procedures | No, the claim arises when the need arises |
| Which technical yardstick applies? | BITV 2.0 referring to EN 301 549 | The same standard, set by contract or in practice |
| What does a failure cost? | A finding in the report and pressure to remedy | Compensation under the AGG, equalisation levy |
| Is an accessibility statement required? | Mandatory, with a feedback mechanism | Voluntary, but binding once published |
The sentence that links both tracks
How many employees this affects
The order of magnitude is not a fringe case. At the end of 2025, a good 7.8 million people with severe disabilities (Federal Statistical Office, 2026) lived in Germany, which corresponds to 9.4 percent of the population (Federal Statistical Office, 2026). For the design of internal systems the breakdown matters more than the total: blindness or a visual impairment was present in 4 percent of cases (Federal Statistical Office, 2026), while 16 percent (Federal Statistical Office, 2026) had intellectual or mental disabilities. The second group is almost always forgotten in planning, although it is the larger one: it benefits less from screen reader compatibility than from plain language, calm interfaces and forms that save an intermediate state.
In working life this condenses into concrete figures. The number of employed people with severe disabilities at employers with 20 or more workplaces came to around 1.14 million (Federal Employment Agency, 2026). Their employment rate stood at 50.9 percent (Federal Employment Agency, 2026), clearly below the rate for the population as a whole, and the unemployment rate at 12.0 percent (Federal Employment Agency, 2026). The European perspective adds the social price: people with disabilities are at risk of poverty and social exclusion at 28.4 percent compared with 18.4 percent (European Commission, 2021). At that point a recruitment portal that cannot be operated by keyboard is not a detail of user guidance but a filter in front of the labour market.
- In total 1,267,000 mandatory workplaces (Federal Employment Agency, 2026) were available for people with severe disabilities — every one of them needs usable working tools.
- For unfilled mandatory workplaces the levy rises to up to 720 euros per month (Federal Employment Agency, 2026), so an inaccessible application and onboarding system indirectly makes non-recruitment more expensive too.
- Public administration shows the highest share of fully met quotas at 64 percent (Federal Employment Agency, 2026); the usability of internal specialist procedures is correspondingly more often an everyday topic there.
- Where a representative body for severely disabled employees exists, it belongs in the requirements list of every procurement, not in the final acceptance test.
- Barriers that surface during integration management are already documented; those records are the cheapest defect list an organisation can get.
- Anyone surveying needs only after hiring negotiates retrofitting instead of selection — and pays the difference.
What typically breaks in internal systems
Internal applications have one disadvantage compared with public websites: nobody outside ever looks at them. The failure patterns are nevertheless the same ones measured on open pages year after year. Automatically detectable WCAG failures were found on 95.9 percent of home pages (WebAIM Million, 2026), low-contrast text on 83.9 percent (WebAIM Million, 2026), with an average of 56.1 errors per page (WebAIM Million, 2026). Contrast is the most rewarding of these, because it is settled entirely in the design; how to measure the values correctly and which traps the measurement holds is covered in the article on colour contrast. And anyone using colour as the only signal loses it completely in forced-colours environments, which the article on high contrast mode explores.
The second block is home-made. Home pages with ARIA markup averaged 59.1 errors compared with 42 (WebAIM Million, 2026) without it, and ARIA usage rose by 27 percent (WebAIM Million, 2026) within a single year. This shows up particularly in internal tools, where custom tables, trees and calendars are built with enthusiasm; how roles and states are set correctly is described in the article on ARIA roles and live regions, and the special cases of nested tables in the article on complex data tables. Navigation, meanwhile, hangs on very simple things: advanced screen reader users navigate by headings at 78 percent compared with 47 percent (WebAIM Screen Reader Survey, 2024) among beginners, while landmarks are the primary method for only 3.7 percent (WebAIM Screen Reader Survey, 2024). A clean heading hierarchy in the intranet therefore buys more than any additional role attribute.
The classic: the session that closes
Cost, funding and the reasonableness line
The reasonableness assessment is rarely thought through wrongly, but it is often calculated wrongly. For the procurement of technical work aids, their maintenance, repair and training in their use, costs can be covered in full (Federal Ministry of Justice). In addition, employers can receive loans or grants covering the full amount of the necessary costs incurred (Federal Ministry of Justice) for certain measures. Anyone costing an adaptation to a specialist procedure without those funds and then pointing to disproportionate expenditure has the wrong number on the scale. The sequence is therefore: establish the need, clarify the funding route, then calculate — and record the result in writing, with a date and the alternatives examined.
The second cost lever sits before procurement. A standard product that already meets the requirements of EN 301 549 costs a fraction to adapt compared with one that has to be retrofitted; for in-house development the component library decides. For content management systems there is an additional point: not only the output but the authoring tool itself should be operable, which the article on accessible content management systems addresses. The same applies to the learning environment used for mandatory training, see the article on accessible learning platforms. And anyone maintaining locations on a map will find the typical pitfalls in the article on accessible maps.
- Take stock: which systems does the workforce use daily, which of them are third-party products, and who is the contracting party?
- Write the requirements down: EN 301 549 and WCAG 2.2 level AA as a contractual commitment, not a statement of intent in an annex.
- Involve those affected: bring the representative body and the works council in early, and evaluate needs recorded in integration management.
- Measure instead of assuming: keyboard path, screen reader output, magnification to 200 percent, contrast values, time limits.
- Clarify funding before assessing reasonableness — the line moves with the grant.
- Document the outcome: finding, measure, deadline, owner. A list without a date is a statement of intent.
Cutting the audit scope to fit internal systems
An audit that measures only the public website will not find the barriers the workforce hits. The cut for internal systems differs in three respects. First, the audit needs test accounts in several roles, because caseworkers, managers and HR see different interfaces. Second, it has to include states that rarely occur on a website: an expired session, a locked account, an approval in progress, a stand-in arrangement. Third, the critical paths are seldom reading pages but multi-step form journeys. How error messages and required-field logic should be exposed is covered in the article on accessible forms, and the basics of operating without a mouse in the article on keyboard navigation.
The yardstick stays the same as outside. The European standard directs clause 9 at software in web pages (EN 301 549); for text a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 (W3C, WCAG 2.2) applies, and for controls a target size of at least 24 by 24 CSS pixels (W3C, WCAG 2.2). These values are violated more often in internal tools than on marketing pages, because information density is placed above ergonomics there: small icon buttons inside table rows, grey helper text, tightly packed action menus. It is also worth checking what actually reaches a speech output; our page on screen reader testing describes the approach. Findings should then be sorted by effect rather than by system, so that measures land where they belong.
The question is not whether an internal system falls under the BFSG. The question is whether a colleague can submit her leave request without help. A lawyer answers the first question; a keyboard test answers the second.
In practice this means an audit that takes the workforce view along costs little extra when it is planned together with the review of the public services. The report then sorts by effect instead of by system, and the measures land where they belong — partly in in-house development, partly in a change request to the vendor, partly in training for the editorial team. For the last point we offer training courses cut specifically for internal editorial teams; the framework for the technical review is described on the page about the WCAG audit. What gets touched first over the coming months is decided by the number of affected transactions, not by the number of findings.
Sources and studies
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