Accessible website for public bodies and businesses

Who it applies to

Two sets of rules cover website accessibility, for two different groups.

• Public bodies fall under the EU's Directive 2016/2102 — in Hungary, Act LXXV of 2018: state and budgetary bodies, local authorities, public foundations, and the public-interest organisations these supervise or mostly finance. Their websites have had to comply since 23 September 2020.
• Businesses fall under the European Accessibility Act from 28 June 2025, but only for specified services, such as e-commerce; microenterprises with fewer than ten people and no more than two million euros in turnover are exempt for services.

The exceptions, the deadlines and the rules for old content are in a separate piece. When I measure, I use WCAG 2.1 AA: for public bodies it is the official measure, through the European standard EN 301 549; for businesses, the practical one.

What the law asks of public bodies

• A compliant website: sufficient contrast, an interface navigable by keyboard, text descriptions for images, a structure a screen reader can make sense of, labelled forms — and downloadable documents such as PDFs count too.
• An accessibility statement on the website, following the EU model: what is not accessible, why, and what the alternative is; where problems can be reported; and a link to the monitoring body's procedure. It has to rest on an actual evaluation, and say how it was prepared.
• A feedback mechanism through which anyone can report what they cannot reach. In Hungary the reply is due within 30 days.

In Hungary the Digital Hungary Agency has monitored compliance since 2025, on its own initiative or on a complaint. According to the monitoring report (in Hungarian), between 2022 and 2024, 72% of 1,123 checks found no statement, and of the 73 websites examined in detail, 4 fully complied. In October 2026 I measured 49 municipal websites myself; the results are in a separate piece.

How I measure

Of the fifty WCAG 2.1 AA success criteria, a machine can decide some, and a person the rest. Two scripts measure the machine part, in a real browser, page by page:

• contrast on every piece of text, in the light and the dark colour scheme — from the text's actual colour, opacity included, blended onto the background behind it;
• heading structure: a single main heading, and a hierarchy with no skipped levels;
• text descriptions on every image, and a name on every link and button;
• a visible focus indicator on every clickable element — measured by actually focusing it, not read from the stylesheet;
• the page's language, and the main landmarks: navigation and content.

What a machine cannot decide, I go through by hand: whether an image description says what matters in the image, whether a link's name makes sense on its own, whether a form can be completed by keyboard, and whether the page stays legible at double text size. The report keeps measurement and judgement apart — the statement is written from it, and says how.

This site is measured by the same two scripts: every page, in both colour schemes, before each release.

Fix or rebuild

If the site runs on WordPress or hand-written HTML and the errors sit in the content — an image without a description, a styled paragraph instead of a heading, an unlabelled form field —, I fix them on the existing site. If the system itself produces the errors, say a page builder that writes the same inaccessible code on every page, or if the site runs on another system, I rebuild it on a custom theme and move the content across.

Which one it is comes out of the assessment, and the quote itemises either. With a rebuild, contrast, structure and keyboard navigation are part of the new site by default.

When you do not need this

If your business website introduces you but provides no service through it, or if you run a microenterprise, the European Accessibility Act does not apply to you. In that case that is what I write back, not a quote. On a new site, contrast, structure and keyboard navigation are part of the work anyway, at no extra charge.

Questions on this topic