BaFG
self-check

Two questions this answers in about twenty minutes: does the Barrierefreiheitsgesetz apply to you, and what would fail first if someone looked. Nothing is scanned and nothing is stored — the answers stay in your browser until you decide to send them.

253Austrian websites we measured to build this list
90.9%had at least one WCAG 2.1 AA failure
20 minwhat the seven checks take, on your own site, by eye
01The check

Start with scope, not with code

Most accessibility advice starts with the technical list. That is the wrong end. The first question is whether the law reaches you at all, and it is decided by two numbers and one feature — the rest only matters afterwards.

The order of the seven checks below is not arbitrary either. It follows how often each failure actually occurred when we measured 253 Austrian shops, hotels and pharmacies, most frequent first. You are looking at your own site while you answer.

01 — Does the law apply to you

Do you have 10 or more employees?

Below 10 employees and below €2 million you are exempt as a micro-enterprise. Both conditions have to be true — one alone is not enough.

Is your annual turnover or balance sheet total above €2 million?

Either figure counts. If turnover is under but the balance sheet total is over, you are above the threshold.

Can a consumer buy, book or make an appointment on your website?

Web shops, hotel and travel booking, online banking, telecoms, e-books, ticketing. Appointment booking counts even when the underlying service does not — a clinic, a studio, a workshop.

02 — Seven checks you can do yourself

Can you zoom?

Failed on 15.5% of shops · 31.3% of pharmacies

On your phone, pinch to zoom on your own site. If nothing happens, a viewport setting is blocking it. One line to fix, and it is the failure that affects the most people.

Tab through the page

No automated tool finds this

Using only the Tab key, walk the whole path from product to confirmed order, or from form to sent. You must always see where you are.

Do your icon buttons have names?

Failed on 57.8% of shops · 67.7% of hotels

The cart, the burger menu, the search magnifier. To a screen reader an unnamed icon is announced as “button”, nothing more. Usually one attribute each.

Is the text readable?

Failed on 80.6% of shops — the most common failure of all

Grey on white, light text on a photo, placeholder text inside inputs. AA asks for 4.5:1 on normal text. Our own navigation measured 1.81:1 before we fixed it.

Do your images say anything?

Failed on 25.2% of shops

Every meaningful image needs a text alternative; decorative ones need an empty one. A product photo with no alt text is an invisible product.

Do your forms have real labels?

Placeholder text is not a label

A label must stay visible while the field is being filled. Placeholder text disappears on the first keystroke, and error messages must say what to do, not just that something is wrong.

Does anything move on its own?

Carousels, autoplay, parallax

Anything that moves for more than five seconds needs a way to stop it, and the site must respect the reduced-motion setting.

The counter below needs JavaScript. The checks themselves do not — you can work through them as they are.

02Questions

What this is and is not

Is this a compliance certificate?
No. There is no certificate that makes a website legally compliant in Austria, and anyone offering one is selling you something else. This tells you whether the law is likely to apply to you, and it walks you through seven failures that we found most often in 253 real Austrian websites. A legal assessment is a conversation with a lawyer.
Why does it ask me instead of scanning my site?
Because the answers that matter cannot be scanned. Whether a keyboard user can complete your checkout, whether an error message says what to do, whether a label stays visible while someone types — no automated tool reports any of that, and those are the parts the law is about. Automated scanning finds somewhere between 20% and 50% of problems. We do it as part of a paid audit, alongside the manual work.
What happens to my answers?
Nothing, unless you choose to send them. There is no server behind this page: your answers stay in your browser. If you tick the box and press send, your own mail client opens with the result written out, and you send it yourself. We never see anything you do not deliberately send.
We are under ten people. Can we stop reading?
For the law, probably yes — the micro-enterprise exemption needs both fewer than 10 employees and under €2 million. For the business, no. Roughly one in four people has some form of impairment, and a site they cannot use is a sale you do not make. The seven checks below take twenty minutes.
03Next step

If you found things

A real audit pairs the automated pass with manual testing — keyboard, focus order, screen reader, forms — and returns an hour estimate per fix, in priority order. If you would rather read first, the study behind these numbers is published in full.

Accessibility & BaFG Read the study The long checklist