Web Accessibility: When It's Required – and When It Pays Off

An accessible website can be used by everyone — including people with visual, hearing, motor, or cognitive impairments. It works with screen readers, keyboards, and voice control, not just a mouse and good eyesight.

The term doesn't mean a separate special version of the site. It means a website that is built from the start for different ways of perceiving and interacting.

In practice: whoever takes accessibility seriously builds more carefully. Clear structure, readable contrast, and plain language ultimately help everyone — not just people with disabilities.

The legal situation in Switzerland is narrower than many think — and at the same time less strict than some claim. The key piece of legislation is the Disability Equality Act, or BehiG.

The BehiG today primarily obliges the federal government, federally affiliated enterprises, and public bodies. Their digital offerings must be accessible. Private companies are currently mostly not directly covered.

For an SME without a public mandate, this means: accessibility in Switzerland is today mostly a voluntary decision — for now.

For companies doing business in the EU, the decisive lever comes not from Bern, but from Brussels. The European Accessibility Act, or EAA, has been in force since 28 June 2025.

The EAA requires accessibility for many digital products and services offered in the EU. This includes online shops, banking, e-books, and booking systems. What matters is the sales market, not the company's registered address.

If a Swiss company sells to customers in the EU, it may therefore be affected. Exceptions apply to micro-enterprises with fewer than ten employees and a maximum of two million euros in revenue or balance sheet total.

For mid-sized Swiss SMEs with EU business, this means: the obligation doesn't start in 2027 — it starts today.

When things get concrete, there's no avoiding the WCAG. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines are the international standard for accessible websites — and the foundation that both the BehiG and the EAA reference.

Simply put, the WCAG are a set of testable criteria for how accessible a website is. For you, this means a shared measuring stick rather than guesswork.

The guidelines have three levels: A, AA, and AAA. Level A is the minimum, AAA is the maximum for special cases. In practice, AA is the relevant target — it's what most legal requirements point to.

Accessibility sounds abstract, but it consists of manageable, concrete building blocks. Most of them go unnoticed by visitors without impairments. When they're missing, however, they exclude people.

A real-world example: an accounting firm offers forms online that can only be filled out with a mouse. Anyone who relies on a keyboard can't get through. Another: a hotel uses light grey text on a white background — elegant, but for many people simply unreadable.

The most important areas at a glance:

Many websites are inaccessible not out of bad intent, but because of how they're built. This is exactly where the limits of platform-based construction become visible.

Page builders and drag-and-drop editors generate their code automatically. The result looks clean in the browser but often consists of nested, meaningless elements under the hood. Screen readers and keyboards struggle to navigate through it.

That doesn't mean every page builder site is inaccessible. But the more a platform hides its structure and code, the harder clean accessible work becomes. Anyone using a page builder should check accessibility with Squarespace early on. On every platform: clarify the limits, not just at the relaunch.

The flip side: a site built from scratch with clean semantic HTML is usually already largely accessible, without extra cost.

Accessibility and search engine optimization pursue different goals, but share the same foundation. What guides a screen reader also helps Google.

Clean headings, descriptive alt texts, meaningful link labels, and fast load times contribute to both. An accessible site is therefore rarely worse for SEO — usually it's better.

Anyone who has their accessible website optimized often gets better rankings as a side effect. That makes the investment easier to justify.

The honest answer: it depends on when you start. Building accessibility in from the beginning costs little extra. Trying to retrofit it into a finished site can be expensive.

The difference isn't in the design — it's in the underlying structure. Getting that right early saves costly corrections later.

You don't need to be an expert to get a rough sense of your website's state. Three simple tests give a first impression in a matter of minutes. They don't replace a full audit — but as a starting point they're enough.

If you find several issues, a more thorough analysis is worthwhile. A free accessibility consultation helps you prioritize the findings and decide on next steps.

AI tools promise to solve accessibility automatically. They help — but they don't replace careful work.

Automated testing tools like Lighthouse or axe only catch a portion of issues. Estimates suggest around 30 to 40 percent of WCAG criteria can actually be tested automatically. The rest — plain language, meaningful alt texts, logical navigation — ultimately requires human judgment.

AI can generate good draft alt texts or surface initial weaknesses. That saves time. But responsibility for ensuring the site is actually usable remains with you.

So-called accessibility overlays — widgets that claim to make everything accessible with a single click — usually don't deliver on that promise. They mask symptoms instead of fixing the foundation.