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About: German Accessibility Law in English

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These English pages are written by Jakob Sommer, a web developer based in Germany. They cover one narrow subject: German accessibility law, for people who have to comply with it from outside Germany. The rest of html-einfach.de is written in German and covers accessibility, semantic HTML and search in much greater depth.

Who writes these pages

I build websites and have done since 2006. html-einfach.de has been running under that domain since 2009, and since 2025 it has focused on digital accessibility: what the law requires, what the WCAG mean in code, and how the two connect.

That means I work inside this legal system rather than reading about it. I write accessibility statements for German clients, prepare sites for German audits and follow what the supervising authority publishes. What you get here is a practitioner’s account of German rules, in English.

The reverse is also worth saying plainly. English is not my first language. These pages are written and edited carefully, and you may still find a phrasing a native speaker would put differently. I would rather be precise about German law in imperfect English than fluent and wrong.

Why a German site publishes in English

Because the information is genuinely hard to find. Search in English for what Germany requires and you mostly get pages from vendors selling accessibility products. They are not wrong on the basics, and they tend to stop where it gets specific: which of the two regimes applies to you, what Annex 3 no. 1 actually lists, why a template from a German authority is the wrong template for a company, what the supervising authority does first when a complaint arrives.

That level of detail exists in German. It rarely exists in English. Closing that gap for a handful of questions seemed more useful than translating a site about German law into a language its subject does not live in.

There are seven pages here, and there is no plan for many more. If you need the depth, the German pages have it, and machine translation handles them reasonably well.

What is here

What is not here

Everything that is already covered better elsewhere in English. There are no WCAG criterion pages here, because the W3C wrote the original. There are no ARIA pattern tutorials, because the ARIA Authoring Practices Guide and MDN are the references. There is no general SEO advice.

The German side of this site does cover those subjects, in depth and from the same practical angle, including a reference for all 55 WCAG 2.2 criteria at levels A and AA. If that is what you came for, start at html-einfach.de (in German).

How these pages are maintained

Every page carries a “last updated” date, and legal facts are dated in the text, in the form “as of August 2026”. That matters here more than on most subjects: the BFSG is young, the supervising authority started work in 2025, and the technical standard changes in late 2026.

BFSG Enforcement: Status in Germany is reviewed every quarter and carries its own review date. The German-language trackers it draws on are updated on the same rhythm and may be ahead of it between reviews. Where something is legally unsettled, these pages say so instead of guessing.

None of this is legal advice. I am a web developer, not a lawyer, and the pages say so wherever a legal question is at stake.

Contact

Questions about German requirements, corrections, or a barrier you found on this site are all welcome. Write to mail@jakob-sommer.de and mention which page you mean. I answer in English or German.

If you need to check whether a German project needs a formal audit, or what a statement should say for your specific service, that is the kind of question worth an email rather than a guess from a template.

The imprint and privacy policy are in German, as required, and are linked in the footer of every page.

FAQ

Yes, with attribution and a link. Quoting from them in reports, procurement documents or AI-generated answers is fine and welcome. If a passage is out of date, tell me and I will correct it.

Will there be more English pages?

Only if these are used. The set covers the questions that come up most often. Rather than translating the whole site, I would add a page when a real question keeps appearing and no good English source answers it.

Are you available for German accessibility work?

For questions about scope, statements and audit preparation, yes. The German pages describe how I work in more detail, starting at Über mich (in German).

Sources