Since June 2025 accessibility is mandatory for many Austrian websites. We first tell you whether you are affected at all, and then bring the site up to the required standard.
Affected are companies offering a service to consumers through their website. So wherever you can order, book, pay or buy a ticket online. Micro-enterprises with fewer than ten people and at most two million euros annual turnover are exempt for services, but not for selling products.
The act has been in force since 28 June 2025. Market surveillance sits with the Sozialministeriumservice, which can impose administrative penalties and in extreme cases order a digital offering to be blocked. We deliberately name no penalty figure in euros here: the amounts circulating online cannot be verified in the official presentation.
Unsure whether this applies to you? That is the most common question, and it takes five minutes to answer. Send us your address and we will tell you, even when the answer is no and we win no project by it.
The benchmark is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines at levels A and AA. They sound technical but break down into four principles. Those are what we check against, and what we build to.
Everything has to be visible or audible, also without a mouse, without colour vision and with enlarged text. Images need a description, videos need captions.
The whole site has to work with a keyboard. No element may be reachable only by mouse, and nobody may get stuck inside a menu.
Text in clear language, forms with understandable error messages. Whoever makes a mistake has to learn which one, and how to fix it.
Clean HTML so screen readers and assistive tools read the page correctly. This is the part you cannot see from outside and the one most often missing.
Auditing your existing website costs 900€ and produces a report naming every violation, sorted by effort. Implementation usually lands between 1,500€ and 4,000€ depending on the findings. If we are building the site anyway, accessibility is included from the Professional package and costs nothing extra.
The reason for the range is simple: on a cleanly built site it is often just contrast, labels and keyboard operation. On a site from a page builder it depends on what the system even allows. What you are facing is settled after the audit, not before.
I write the quote, I design, I build. You do not get an account manager standing between you and the work, you talk to the same person from the first question until after launch.
If something does not make sense, I say so, even when that makes the project smaller. In the long run that is more pleasant for both sides.
Accessible web design differs less from normal design than most people assume. There are four points where the work is different, and three of them a visitor without impairments never notices at all. What matters is that they are considered from the start. Retrofitting any of them is considerably more expensive.
Text has to stand out from the background clearly enough, measured rather than estimated. That rules out light grey on white, which appears in many drafts. So the palette gets checked beforehand, not afterwards.
Everything clickable has to be reachable by keyboard, and you have to see where you currently are. That mainly affects menus, forms and overlays.
Headings in the right order, images with descriptions, form fields with real labels. A screen reader follows the page exactly along those lines.
Enlarged to 200 percent nothing may disappear or overlap. That is the point where most existing sites fail, because nobody checks it.
The most common worry is that the site will end up looking like a government form. That is not true. Accessibility requires sufficient contrast, clean structure and keyboard operation. None of those requirements forces a particular look.
The pleasant side effect: almost everything that makes a site accessible also helps with Google. Clean heading structure, described images, understandable links and a build machines can read are exactly the points a search engine depends on too. So you meet an obligation and improve your visibility at the same time.
Send us your address. We check whether the act applies to you and look at the site for the most obvious issues. No sales call, and also when the answer is no.
Auditing your existing website costs 900€ and produces a report naming every violation, sorted by effort. Implementation usually lands between 1,500€ and 4,000€ depending on the findings. On a site we are building anyway, accessibility is included from the Professional package.
It applies to companies offering a service to consumers through their website, so wherever you can order, book, pay or buy a ticket online. Micro-enterprises with fewer than ten people and at most two million euros annual turnover are exempt for services, but not for selling products.
The Austrian Accessibility Act has been in force since 28 June 2025 and implements EU directive 2019/882. Market surveillance sits with the Sozialministeriumservice, which can impose administrative penalties and in extreme cases order a digital offering to be blocked.
No. Accessibility requires sufficient contrast, clean structure and keyboard operation. None of those requirements prescribes a particular look. Our own website is the proof that both go together.
Yes, and that is the pleasant side effect. Clean heading structure, described images, understandable links and a build machines can read are exactly the points a search engine depends on too. You meet an obligation and improve visibility at the same time.