Accessibility for B2B websites: one question decides whether the BFSG applies to you, and since September the benchmark for your next relaunch is fixed

The BFSG, Germany’s implementation of the European Accessibility Act, has applied since 28 June 2025. For the typical company website in the German B2B mid-market, the honest answer to whether it now has to be accessible is no. For some of these sites the answer is still yes, because of a single feature rather than the industry.

This article settles the question in four steps. It shows what the joint market surveillance authority of the German states actually checks under its January 2026 strategy, why the often quoted transition period to 2030 does not cover websites, and why, since 2 September 2026, it is clear what the next relaunch should target technically.

Does the BFSG apply to B2B websites?

The BFSG covers an exhaustive list of products and services provided to consumers. For company websites, exactly one category matters: services in electronic commerce (section 1(3) no. 5). Section 2 no. 26 BFSG defines them as digital services offered via websites and apps that are provided at a consumer’s individual request with a view to concluding a consumer contract.

A consumer, under section 2 no. 16, is any natural person who buys mainly for purposes outside their trade or self-employed profession. The Bundesfachstelle Barrierefreiheit, the federal competence centre for accessibility, draws the conclusion B2B companies want to hear: services offered exclusively business to business should not be affected by the BFSG. It also leaves out a pure presentation website that informs or advertises products, because the element of an individual request is likely to be missing.

The word “should” deserves attention. The agency’s FAQ is interpretive guidance, not a ruling. Where exactly the line runs when a shop nominally serves only businesses has, to our knowledge, not yet been decided by any court under the BFSG.

The check in four questions

Whether your website is in scope can be settled in an afternoon. The order matters, because each answer can make the following questions unnecessary.

1. Can a consumer conclude a contract with you through the website or app? Ordering, booking, subscribing, fixing a paid appointment. If the answer is no, the check ends here. In our assessment, a contact form after which offer and contract are made outside the website does not change that.
2. Do you effectively exclude consumers? What counts is whether a consumer contract can actually be concluded, not what the footer says. A shop that activates orders only after checking proof of business status is in a different position from one that opens the cart to every visitor.
3. Are you a micro-enterprise? Under section 2 no. 17, that means fewer than ten employees and an annual turnover or balance sheet total of no more than 2 million euros. The MLBF counts in annual work units, includes partner and linked enterprises under the EU definition of small and medium-sized enterprises and recognises a change of size class only after two consecutive financial years. A subsidiary within a group is therefore rarely a micro-enterprise.
4. Does one of the narrow exceptions apply? Not covered are, for example, recorded videos and office documents published before 28 June 2025, third-party content you neither fund nor control, and archives that have not been edited since then (section 1(4)). Anyone relying on a disproportionate burden must document it, reassess it at least every five years and inform the authority (section 17).

Which features bring a B2B website into scope

On typical mid-market sites it is rarely the overall picture that decides, almost always a single feature. The table classifies common cases.

If a spare parts shop is built as a service for trade customers but switched on without checking who orders, it is open to anyone who can place an order. If it is part of the same website, it then pulls the whole company site into scope, not just itself.

If yes, it applies to the whole website

The assumption that making the checkout accessible is enough does not hold. Based on section 12 no. 3 of the BFSG Ordinance and the testing rules in Annex 1 of the Act, the Bundesfachstelle considers it likely that the entire website or app has to meet the requirements (FAQ on electronic commerce, question 3). The guidelines of the Federal Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs put it more briefly, using the example of a hairdresser with appointment booking and product sales: the entire website including checkout has to be made accessible.

What the authority looks at is also set out in the Act. Annex 1 defines the sample: home page, login, sitemap, contact, help and legal pages, the page with the accessibility information, at least one page per service offered including search, downloadable documents, and on top of that randomly selected pages amounting to at least 10 percent of the sample. Every process step is run through in the order a typical user would follow, including forms, error messages and confirmations.

Then there is a duty that is not code. Section 14 requires accessibility information under Annex 3, in the terms and conditions or in another clearly perceivable place: a general description of the service in an accessible format, the explanations needed to understand it, a description of how the requirements are met, and the competent market surveillance authority. The MLBF explicitly warns against confusing this with the “accessibility statement” that public bodies publish under the EU Web Accessibility Directive. A template for public-sector websites therefore does not replace the Annex 3 information. If it is missing, that is a formal non-conformity (section 30), and offering the service that way carries the same fine range as missing accessibility.

What does the market surveillance authority check?

There is a single competent authority nationwide: the Marktüberwachungsstelle der Länder für die Barrierefreiheit von Produkten und Dienstleistungen, MLBF for short, a joint public-law body of all 16 German states based in Magdeburg. According to its own announcements, it moved into its offices at the start of 2026, and its administrative board adopted the market surveillance strategies on 29 January 2026. The strategy for services, dated 8 January 2026, is public, and it answers the question of who gets checked more precisely than any estimate.

The MLBF works risk-based and names its criteria: market share and user reach, company size, relevance for autonomous living, complexity and interactivity of the service, public user feedback, market trends and the results of automated pre-checks. For web-based services in particular, it explicitly relies on testing software to cover more offerings across the market than manual checks could. The strategy calls checking the Annex 3 information an essential part of formal surveillance.

Triggers from outside take priority, though. If a consumer claims in an application under section 32 that they cannot use a service, or only to a limited extent, because of a breach, the authority must open proceedings. Companies that stood out before or cooperated poorly move up the list. The strategy deliberately sets no quantitative minimum inspection level for the first period, because there is no track record yet.

The procedure is staged. First comes a request with a reasonable deadline, then a second one threatening prohibition, after which the authority can order the offering to stop (section 29). Fines sit alongside: up to 100,000 euros for offering a service contrary to section 14(1), and up to 10,000 euros, for example, for refusing information (section 37).

Two further routes bypass the authority. Consumers can turn to the arbitration board under the Disability Equality Act, which has also been responsible for the BFSG since 28 June 2025. Its 2025 annual report counts 436 applications, 4 percent of them under the BFSG. And there are warning letters from competitors; the law firm Heuking reports that the first one landed on its desk barely a month and a half after the Act took effect. Whether BFSG duties are market conduct rules within the meaning of section 3a of the Act against Unfair Competition has, to our knowledge as of 11 October 2026, not been decided in any published judgment. Nobody should sign the enclosed cease-and-desist declaration unexamined for that reason. The open question does not change the duty itself, which the MLBF enforces regardless.

Why the transition period to 2030 protects no website

The Bundesfachstelle’s FAQ also speaks briefly of a five-year transition period for certain services. What is meant is far narrower than the wording suggests. Section 38(1) allows service providers until 27 June 2030 to keep providing their service with products they already used for it before 28 June 2025. And service contracts concluded before that date may continue unchanged until they expire, at most until 27 June 2030.

Products, under section 2 no. 2, are goods from a manufacturing process, and section 1(2) lists exhaustively which ones the Act means: computers with their operating systems, self-service terminals, certain consumer devices and e-readers. The EU summary of the Directive speaks of service providers whose facilities were already lawfully in use before the cut-off date. A website is not one of them. The contract rule, in turn, protects existing contracts, not the website through which new ones are concluded today. Anyone running a shop in 2026 where private individuals order has no grace period.

EN 301 549 V4.1.1: why the next relaunch should target WCAG 2.2

The Act does not spell out in detail what accessible means technically. Section 4 BFSG links it to harmonised standards: anyone who meets a standard whose reference is published in the Official Journal of the EU is presumed to meet the requirements. No such standard has yet been published for the BFSG. Until then, according to the Bundesfachstelle, the current EN 301 549 serves as the authoritative orientation, in version V3.2.1 from 2021, which refers to WCAG 2.1.

On 2 September 2026 the successor appeared: EN 301 549 V4.1.1, jointly issued by ETSI, CEN and CENELEC and adopted on 24 August 2026. It is the first version written specifically for the European Accessibility Act; a new Annex ZB maps its requirements to the Directive’s obligations. The clauses on web content, documents and software now refer to WCAG 2.2. It takes legal effect only when the Commission cites it in the Official Journal. Ireland’s National Disability Authority, which contributed to the revision, currently gives 16 December 2026 for that. It is an expected date, not a decision.

For planning, that is the real news. A relaunch commissioned now will as a rule go live only after the expected citation date; durations and costs are covered in our article on what a B2B website costs. Building to WCAG 2.1 today means targeting a benchmark that is being replaced. The higher benchmark costs nothing in conformance: according to the W3C, quoted verbatim in the standard, content that conforms to WCAG 2.2 also conforms to WCAG 2.1 and 2.0.

On top of that comes a requirement that goes beyond WCAG. Clause 9.7 of the new standard requires that a web page does not block the browser’s modes of presenting it according to user settings and does not explicitly override documented platform accessibility settings, unless that is essential to the content or function. The standard cites the CSS property forced-color-adjust as an example, and colour filters, contrast, text size, pointer size and text cursor as settings. Success criterion 4.1.1 Parsing, by contrast, is dropped, as it already was in WCAG 2.2.

What this looks like on a small scale can be seen on our own home page. It plays an image sequence of 247 frames as you scroll. Anyone who has told their operating system to reduce motion sees three still images instead. The principle is the same as behind clause 9.7: the user’s setting wins over the effect the design would like.

What the numbers say about the state of the web

How far most sites still have to go is measured every year by the WebAIM Million analysis of the home pages of the one million most visited websites. In February 2026, 95.9 percent of them had automatically detectable WCAG failures, an average of 56.1 per page, up from 51 the year before. German sites do slightly better without being good: the 28,401 home pages under .de averaged 46.3 errors. Because automated tests cover only part of the criteria, WebAIM concludes that the share of fully conformant pages is certainly below 4.1 percent.

The list of the most common errors reads like a checklist for the design process: low text contrast on 83.9 percent of pages, missing alternative text for images on 53.1 percent, missing form input labels on 51 percent, empty links on 46.3 percent, empty buttons on 30.6 percent and a missing document language on 13.5 percent. Contrast is not a programming question. It is decided when brand colours and shades of grey are defined, long before anyone writes code.

Part of this work pays off twice. Google states in its image search documentation that it uses alt text together with computer vision and the page content to understand the subject of an image. Headings, labelled forms and alternative text are the structure machines read a page by, too. How AI systems read and cite websites is covered in our article on visibility in ChatGPT.

And if your website is not in scope?

Then there is no duty, and that can be said plainly. Nobody needs to buy an audit for a pure company website because a vendor advertises a 100,000 euro fine. In our assessment, an overlay widget that adds a toolbar via script does not replace the work on the source code anyway, the work that Annex 1 tests with forms, error messages and assistive technologies.

For the next relaunch there are still good reasons to build to WCAG 2.2 AA. The status can change with a single feature: if a shop or appointment booking for private customers is added, the entire site must meet the requirements from that day on. And the scope itself is not final. The Commission has to report on the application of the Directive by 28 June 2030, and the Bundesfachstelle explicitly considers an extension to further products and services possible. The relaunch is the cheapest moment, because contrast, focus states and target sizes are decided in the design system. Afterwards it means touching finished design and finished code again.

The roadmap if you are in scope

• Record the scope in writing. The four questions above, with date, reasoning and the affected parts of the website. This also makes sense for companies that are not in scope: they then have an answer when someone asks.
• Test against WCAG 2.2 AA, not 2.1. Automated tools find part of the errors, the rest only a person with a keyboard and a screen reader will find. The Annex 1 sample is a useful structure for the test report.
• Fix the design first. Contrast values, focus states and minimum sizes belong in the design system before pages are built.
• Write the Annex 3 information. Description of the service, explanations, how the requirements are met, the MLBF as competent authority. Reachable from every page and accessible itself.
• Plan for operations. Section 14(3) requires that the requirements are met at all times and that changes to the underlying standards are taken into account. Every new product text, PDF and image therefore needs an editorial process that sets up headings, alternative text and documents correctly.

Whether an existing theme or a custom build is easier to bring to WCAG 2.2 depends on the case; the trade-off between the two routes is described in our comparison of WordPress and custom development.

What is still open as of 11 October 2026

Three points are unsettled, and they belong in any honest advice. First, there is no judgment on when a shop effectively excludes consumers, or on whether BFSG breaches can be the subject of competitor warning letters. Second, 16 December 2026 is an expected date for citing the new standard; until then V3.2.1 remains the orientation. Third, on 11 March 2026 the European Commission complained in an additional reasoned opinion that Germany had not fully transposed the Directive. The amendment to the Ordinance of 10 July 2026 responds to this according to its explanatory memorandum, but concerns self-service terminals and telecommunications services, not websites. Anyone building to WCAG 2.2 AA today and documenting their scope is prepared for each of these outcomes.

Frequently asked questions about the BFSG for B2B websites