An accessibility statement is a page on your site that says three things. What standard you are aiming at, where you currently fall short, and how somebody blocked by a barrier can reach a human. That is it. It is shorter than most privacy policies and considerably more useful.
It is also, increasingly, a legal requirement rather than a courtesy.
Which Laws Expect One
Several of the laws we track name a statement directly. If any of these apply to you, the page is not optional:
- The European Accessibility Act requires accessibility information to be published for products and services in scope.
- The UK's PSBAR regulations require public sector bodies to publish and maintain a statement in a set format.
- France's RGAA requires a declaration of conformity with a stated conformance level.
- Germany's BFSG requires accessibility information alongside the products and services it covers.
- Ontario's AODA requires larger organisations to publish accessibility policies and a multi-year plan.
Even where no law names it, a statement is worth publishing. It is the first place a frustrated user looks before they complain to anyone else, and a real contact route on that page resolves a great many situations that would otherwise escalate.
The Eight Things a Statement Contains
- A commitment, in one or two sentences, in plain language.
- The standard you are measuring against. Name it precisely, as WCAG 2.2 Level AA rather than "accessibility guidelines".
- Your conformance status, which is one of three. Fully conformant, partially conformant, or not conformant. Partially is the honest answer for nearly everyone.
- What is not accessible yet, listed specifically, with a reason and where possible a date.
- How to reach a human, with an email address and a realistic response time you will actually meet.
- Where to go if you ignore them. The European model statement makes this mandatory, and it wants the enforcement body named, with a link and its contact details. Most published statements skip it, and it is the one block that gives the reader somewhere to escalate to.
- How the site was evaluated, and by whom. Self-assessed, or independently audited, and when.
- The date it was last reviewed. A statement from 2021 tells a visitor nobody has looked since 2021.
Write yours in two minutes
Our accessibility statement generator walks you through most of these and produces a statement with the wording the laws expect. Copy it or download it, free, no signup. Add the enforcement body yourself, since which one applies depends on where you are.
The Three Ways a Statement Backfires
A statement is a public claim about your own site. Claims can be checked, and the standard sets out what a claim has to cover before you can make one. The five conformance requirements are stricter than most people expect: a claim covers whole pages and whole processes, so a checkout that breaks at step four means none of it conforms.
1. Claiming full conformance you do not have
"This site is fully WCAG 2.1 AA compliant" is the single most common line we read, and it is almost never true. Sites change weekly. A page that conformed in March has a new marketing banner by June. Claiming full conformance turns every subsequent failure into a documented contradiction of your own published statement, which is a materially worse position than saying "partially conformant, here is our list".
There is a second cost to that word, and almost nobody knows about it. Saying you fully conform makes the statement a formal conformance claim under WCAG, and a claim has five required components of its own. The date. The guidelines by title, version and web address. The level. A description of exactly which pages are covered, including whether subdomains are in. And the list of web technologies the pages rely on. A statement carrying the word "fully" and none of those five is a claim missing most of what a claim needs. Saying "partially conformant" avoids the whole problem, and WCAG is explicit that you can conform without claiming anything at all.
2. Naming a contact route nobody watches
An address that bounces, a form that goes to a departed employee, a phone number for a closed office. The statement exists so that a blocked user can reach you instead of reaching somebody else. A dead contact route defeats the only mechanism that actually helps.
3. Letting a widget write it for you
Overlay vendors generate statements that claim conformance the widget does not deliver. That is a claim about your site, published on your domain, under your name. The vendor is not the one holding it. Our overlays page documents what the record shows about those claims.
Where to Put It
In the footer, on every page, with link text that says Accessibility or Accessibility statement. Not "Accessibility information" buried in a help centre, not a section inside your terms. Users looking for it expect it in the footer next to Privacy, and so do the auditors checking whether you have one.
Ours is at /accessibility, in our footer, where we are telling you to put yours.
One honest limit
A statement does not make a site accessible and it does not protect you if the site is not. What it does is tell the truth about where you stand and give people a way through when they hit a wall. Publishing one on a site you have not tested just documents a claim you cannot back. Test first, then publish what you found.