One year after the BFSG: what companies actually did, what would have worked – and why the fine is the weakest argument of all.
The short version: Germany's Accessibility Strengthening Act has applied since June 2025, and the market surveillance authority in Magdeburg has been actively checking since January 2026. The most common corporate response was a bought-in overlay plugin. That doesn't work: the US Federal Trade Commission fined the best-known vendor one million dollars in 2025 for claiming its tool made websites WCAG-conformant. Meanwhile the WebAIM Million 2026 analysis shows the first regression in six years: 95.9 percent of home pages have detectable WCAG failures. And six recurring error types account for 96 percent of all problems. These aren't specialist topics. They're fundamentals.
When the BFSG arrived, the same thing happened in a lot of companies: panic in spring, a call to the agency, then the question "isn't there something we can just install?" — and then one line of JavaScript that puts a round icon in the bottom right of the page.
Increase contrast. Enlarge text. Read aloud. Dyslexia mode.
The feeling: sorted. The effect: almost none. And in many cases: negative.
A year on you can take stock, and the result is more interesting than the usual compliance narrative. Two things show up: the pressure has become real — and the industry still mostly bought the wrong thing.
1. What Happened in a Year
A quick situation report, so the baseline is clear.
The authority is working. The joint market surveillance body of the German states for the accessibility of products and services (MLBF), based in Magdeburg, entered its active monitoring phase in January 2026 and has published its inspection strategies. It checks two ways: reactively on complaints — which by its own account takes priority — and actively through its own, often automated sampling. The focus is on services with high reach, high relevance to independent living, and providers with a history of defects.
The fine ceiling is up to €100,000 for serious breaches; in extreme cases the operation of a service can be prohibited.
Warning-letter practice has become more professional. A broadly scattered first wave in summer 2025 has been followed since early 2026 by a second, backed by formal audit reports. Whether BFSG breaches are actionable under German competition law at all is not conclusively settled by the courts — that needs saying. It's a cost risk with an open legal position, not an established cause of action.
And there's pressure from Brussels. In March 2026 the European Commission issued Germany a reasoned opinion on its implementation of the European Accessibility Act. Several trade publications consider a tightening of the German rules likely.
How far implementation has actually got is hard to quantify seriously. Vendors of audit tools report roughly half of criteria met on average — figures from firms whose business depends on the number looking bad, so treat them accordingly. My own observation in projects matches the direction, not necessarily the number.
2. The Overlay Mistake, Now With a Case Number
To what was actually bought.
On 3 January 2025 the US Federal Trade Commission opened proceedings against accessiBe, the best-known vendor of these overlays. The allegation: the company had claimed its tool made any website WCAG-conformant. The FTC considered those claims false, misleading or unsubstantiated. In April 2025 the order became final: one million dollars, plus a prohibition on claiming in future that the automated product can make websites WCAG-conformant or keep them that way — absent evidence. FTC statement on the final order.
Read the core of that order again: a vendor was officially prohibited from promising exactly what its customers were paying it for.
Then there's practice. In the US, where there's active litigation on digital accessibility, operators with an overlay installed continue to get sued — a substantial share of all cases, according to analyses by specialist providers. Those figures again come from market participants, but the direction is undisputed and matches what courts there have been saying for years: an overlay is not evidence of accessibility.
The professional community is unusually united here. The Overlay Fact Sheet has been signed by several hundred accessibility specialists, many of whom rely on assistive technology themselves. overlayfactsheet.com
3. Why This Can't Work Technically
This isn't a vendor problem that a better product would solve. It's a structural one.
An overlay runs in the browser and tries to repair, after the fact, what is missing from structure and content. But most barriers are information gaps, not rendering faults.
Alternative text. A script can detect that an image is there. It cannot know what that image is supposed to mean in this context. The same photo needs a different description on a product page than in a news article. Only the person who placed it knows.
Form labels. A script can guess which label belongs to which field. Guessing is not a strategy on a thirty-field application.
Reading order and structure. Whether the heading hierarchy correctly reflects the content is a question of meaning. Automation can detect patterns, not meaning.
And the worst part: overlays intervene in an environment where users are already running their own tools. Someone using a screen reader has had it configured for years. A script interfering with that usually makes things worse rather than better. That's why rejection is so widespread in the affected community — not on principle, but from experience.
The comparison I use in projects: an overlay is a ramp placed in front of a building without checking whether there's a door behind it.
4. The State of the Web, Measured
Now the numbers that show where the problem actually sits.
WebAIM runs an annual automated analysis of the home pages of the one million most visited websites. The February 2026 results:
- 95.9 percent of home pages had detectable WCAG 2 failures, up from 94.8 percent the year before. That's the first regression after six years of slow improvement.
- An average of 56.1 detected errors per page, up 10.1 percent on 2025.
- WebAIM names the main drivers as sharply increased page complexity and growth in ARIA code — both linked to heavier use of frameworks, libraries and automatically generated code.
Two caveats so the figure isn't over-read: these are automated tests of home pages. Automated testing covers only a subset of WCAG criteria and cannot establish conformance — so the real situation is likely worse, not better.
But the most important finding sits elsewhere anyway: the same six error types account for 96 percent of all detected errors, for the seventh year running.
- Insufficient text contrast
- Missing alternative text
- Missing form labels
- Empty links
- Empty buttons
- Missing document language
Look at that list. There isn't a single specialist topic on it. Any design tool checks contrast. Alternative text is an editorial decision. A form label is one attribute in the code. The document language is precisely one word in the HTML head.
That's the real message of this article: the bulk of the problem is solvable with fundamentals that require no dedicated team. It just doesn't happen, because nobody in the process asks for it.
5. Why the Fine Is the Worst Argument
Now the uncomfortable part, aimed at everyone who took this into their company last year with "we have to do something because of the law" — myself included, because that argument appears in my earlier pieces too.
It works. But it produces the wrong measures.
Someone acting out of fear of a fine buys whatever calms the fear fastest: a plugin, a statement page, a certificate with a seal. All things that show the outside world something was done, and change nothing on the inside.
Someone thinking from use instead lands automatically on the list in section 4 — because those are the failures people actually run into.
It's the same mechanism as with forms, error messages and the last mile: compliance asks "is that enough?" Design asks "does that work?" The first question is cheaper to answer and produces results nobody benefits from. And it has an unpleasant side effect: it turns accessibility into a burden you work through rather than a quality you want to have.
6. The Argument to Use Instead
First: the size of the group. Around eight million people in Germany have a recognised severe disability, and that's only the formal category. Add everyone with temporary impairments, everyone whose eyesight is declining, everyone with motor limitations — and simply: an ageing population. Build a website for thirty-year-olds with perfect eyesight and you're building for a shrinking market.
Second — and this is the point that actually convinces decision-makers: the curb-cut effect. The dropped kerb was built for wheelchair users. Today it's used mostly by people with prams, wheeled suitcases, bicycles and shopping trolleys.
Digitally it's the same, on nearly every point:
- Contrast helps everyone looking at a phone in sunlight.
- Captions are used predominantly by people without hearing impairments — on the train, in the office, at night.
- Keyboard operability is the foundation for every power-user shortcut and every piece of automation.
- Clear labels and comprehensible error messages help everyone, see the earlier parts of this series.
- Clean semantics is simultaneously the basis for search engines and for any machine processing of your content.
Accessibility is the only quality standard I know whose side effect is making the product better for everyone else too. That isn't a moral argument. It's an argument about product quality.
7. What Would Actually Have Worked
What should a company have done with the money it spent on an annual overlay subscription?
1. Fix the six errors. In that order, across all pages. This isn't a project, it's a clean-up — and it covers the bulk of measurable problems.
2. Repair components, not pages. If your buttons, form fields, modals and tables come from a library, you fix each error exactly once. If they don't, that's the real job: sort out the library first, then derive everything from it.
3. The keyboard test. Put the mouse away. Operate your most important flow using only Tab, Enter and arrow keys. Is focus always visible? Can you get out of every overlay? Is the order logical? Twenty minutes, and more informative than most automated reports.
4. Listen with a screen reader once. Not clicking around yourself — invite someone who uses the device daily and watch. That's the meeting after which things start happening in projects.
5. Publish the accessibility statement. It's required under the BFSG anyway, and its absence is the most easily evidenced allegation in warning letters. Half a day's work.
6. Into the definition of done. Otherwise you'll be producing new failures from tomorrow while fixing the old ones. That's exactly what the WebAIM curve shows: more tools, more awareness, more regulation — and worse numbers, because production creates barriers faster than remediation removes them.
8. The Business Case
As in the other parts of this series:
The cost side is lower than everyone assumes. Build accessibility in from the start and you barely pay a premium — the six most common failures don't arise from effort, they arise from inattention. Only retrofitting gets expensive, in proportion to how long you wait.
The risk side you know: up to €100,000, prohibition in extreme cases, plus warning-letter costs in an unsettled legal position, plus audit effort.
The revenue side never gets calculated and is the larger one: every barrier is an abandonment. A form field without a label isn't hard for screen reader users, it's impossible. That's not a worse conversion rate, that's a conversion rate of zero — in a group large enough to show up in your statistics if you went looking.
And the item you can cut immediately: the overlay subscription. That money is better spent on two weeks of clean-up.
Why You Can Take My Word for It
I'm Tobias Adam, a freelance UX designer in Hamburg, more than ten years in digital product development.
I learned the craft agency-side, including at Jung von Matt and deepblue networks. I've worked for BMW, Audi, FIFA, Union Investment, Vodafone, OBI and Deutsche Messe, among others. Over 20 awards, including Webby, ADC and Cannes.
What I've learned in those years: accessibility rarely fails on capability and almost never on budget. It fails because nobody asks early enough. In the projects where it worked — from application flows like the VisualVest account opening in the Union Investment orbit through to onboardings and internal systems — it was never a separate accessibility project. It was a question asked in the concept, again in design, and a third time at sign-off.
Today I work freelance and together with HC Merkle as intro.team — two freelancers for the phase where an idea becomes a testable product: concept, UX, UI, prototype, user testing. Short cycles, senior staffing, no agency apparatus.
The Short Version
- An overlay is not evidence of accessibility. The FTC penalised the best-known vendor for claiming otherwise.
- Most barriers are information gaps, not rendering faults. No script can guess what an image means.
- 95.9 percent of home pages have detectable WCAG failures — the first regression in six years.
- Six error types account for 96 percent of all problems. Contrast, alt text, labels, empty links, empty buttons, document language.
- These are fundamentals, not specialist topics. Nobody just asks for them.
- Repair components, not pages. Fix once instead of a hundred times.
- The keyboard test takes twenty minutes and finds more than most reports.
- The fine is the weakest argument. It reliably produces measures that help nobody.
- Curb-cut effect: what gets built for a few ends up used by everyone.
- Into the definition of done. Otherwise you create barriers faster than you remove them.
Accessibility isn't a state you purchase. It's a question that has to be asked early enough — and then again, and again.
Provisionally the last part of this series. Previously: forms, field count and smart defaults — B2B software and internal tools — error states — the last mile — cancellation flows — bureaucratic and legal language.
Sources and Further Reading
- WebAIM Million 2026, analysis of the home pages of the top one million websites – webaim.org
- FTC: final order against accessiBe, April 2025 – ftc.gov
- Overlay Fact Sheet, signed by several hundred specialists – overlayfactsheet.com
- Barrierefreiheitsstärkungsgesetz (BFSG), in force since 28 June 2025 – bfsg-gesetz.de
- Market surveillance body of the German states for accessibility (MLBF), Magdeburg – mlbf-barrierefrei.de
- Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1/2.2, quick reference – w3.org