Nearly a year on: what Austria's top companies reveal about digital accessibility

On 28 June 2025, the Austrian Accessibility Act (BaFG) came into force, requiring companies with consumer-facing digital services to make them accessible. Nearly a year on, we wanted to understand what that looks like in practice.

In May 2026, Accessiway analysed 17 pages across 16 ATX Prime companies offering digital services, including banking platforms, telecoms, booking systems and energy portals. We combined automated scanning with manual expert review across nine WCAG criteria. This was not a full compliance audit, but a directional snapshot of common issues across high-traffic pages.

Every page still has issues

All 17 pages tested showed at least one accessibility issue that would need to be addressed as part of achieving BaFG compliance. Some companies are doing a great deal right — three had only a single issue across all criteria tested. But the persistence of basic, well-documented problems across leading organisations suggests the challenge is no longer awareness. It is execution.

"The legal framework is in place, organisations broadly understand what is required, and responsibilities have been assigned," says Jacopo Deyla, our Chief Accessibility Officer. "But the same issues continue to appear at scale, showing there is still a gap in implementation."

What users experience

This gap is visible in user behaviour. A representative Accessiway survey of 1,000 Austrians found that 80% regularly encounter digital barriers, nearly one third struggle with input fields, and almost one in five report issues with content that doesn't adapt to screen size.

Older users are particularly affected. One in five Austrians is already over 65, a group that relies heavily on digital banking, insurance and energy services and is most impacted by issues like small text and poor scaling.

What we found

The most common issue was colour contrast, appearing on 82% of pages, consistent with global findings from the WebAIM Million Report 2026. Unlike structural failures, contrast issues can in many cases be addressed through an accessibility widget without touching the underlying codebase, making them faster and less disruptive to fix than many organisations assume.

More significant were the issues automated tools often miss: keyboard navigation failures on 65% of pages, reflow issues affecting mobile and zoom on 59%, and text resize failures on 41%. These affect large parts of the population, not just users with permanent disabilities.

The automated testing gap

Several sites scored near-perfect on Google Lighthouse, yet still failed multiple criteria in manual testing. One scored 0.99 out of 1.0 but had issues in five of nine areas assessed. This points to a structural problem in how accessibility is currently being measured. Automated tools detect some issues well, colour contrast in particular, but are far less effective at identifying failures related to keyboard navigation, reflow and text resize, which are among the most widespread issues we found. As development cycles accelerate, increasingly supported by AI-assisted coding, issues may be introduced as quickly as they are resolved.

Owned but not embedded

Since January 2025, Austrian companies with more than 400 employees have been legally required to appoint a dedicated accessibility officer. But accessibility is not yet embedded into day-to-day development processes and is still treated as a project rather than a continuous quality standard.

"The problem is not that these issues are hard to fix," says Jacopo. "Contrast, for example, can often be resolved without touching the codebase at all. The harder question is why they keep coming back. And the answer is that most organisations are still relying on periodic audits to catch issues that are being introduced continuously."

What needs to change

The shift required is from periodic audits to continuous visibility, understanding accessibility status at any given time and tracking remediation progress as issues are resolved. The European Accessibility Act will continue to drive enforcement, and the organisations best positioned will be those that integrate accessibility into their operational processes rather than treating it as a compliance exercise completed once a year.

Nearly a year on, the picture in Austria is one of progress but also persistent gaps. The groundwork is in place and the challenge now is implementation.

Want to understand where your organisation stands? Contact Accessiway to find out more about how we support companies across Europe with digital accessibility compliance.

This blog post is based on original research conducted by Accessiway in May 2026. We analysed all consumer-facing companies listed on the Austrian ATX Prime index, 16 companies in total covering 17 web pages, focusing on organisations offering digital services directly to end consumers, including banking platforms, telecommunications services, booking systems, energy portals and logistics tools. This focus reflects the scope of the European Accessibility Act, which primarily applies to organisations offering digital products and services directly to end consumers. B2B and industrial companies without significant publicly accessible user interfaces were therefore excluded. Analysis combined automated scanning with manual expert review across the following nine WCAG criteria: colour contrast (1.4.3), flashing content (2.3.1), pause and stop controls (2.2.2), text resize (1.4.4), reflow (1.4.10), skip links (2.4.1), keyboard navigation (2.1.1), focus visibility (2.4.7) and tab order (2.4.3). This does not constitute a full accessibility audit or compliance assessment.