Accessibility laws · Brazil

Brazil: Lei Brasileira de Inclusão and eMAG

Brazil's federal government is under a court order right now. On 8 July 2026 a federal judge in São Paulo gave the Union 180 days to produce a digital accessibility plan for federal websites and web applications. The daily fine for missing it is R$10,000, and the court named ABNT NBR 17225:2025 as the standard to hit. That clock runs out in early January 2027. The case exists for a simple reason. Article 63 has bound Brazilian companies and government alike since 2016, and in eleven years nobody ever wrote the regulation that would say what it means.

In force since: 2016
The website clause: Art. 63
Government standard: eMAG
Sector reached: Private

What the law is

Law 13.146/2015, the Lei Brasileira de Inclusão, took effect on 2 January 2016, which was 180 days after publication. Article 63 makes accessibility obligatory on internet sites maintained by companies with headquarters or commercial representation in Brazil, and on government sites, so that a person with a disability can reach the information available. It asks for that access in line with the best accessibility practices and guidelines adopted internationally. No standard is named. No conformance level is set. No deadline is given. What the article does carry, in its first paragraph, is a duty almost nobody mentions. Every covered site must display an accessibility symbol prominently. That is one line of work and it is checkable in ten seconds.

The Brazilian story does not start in 2015, whatever most summaries tell you. Decree 5.296 of 2 December 2004 already required accessibility on public administration portals and websites, within twelve months of publication, so from December 2005. It was written for people with visual disability, it allowed the deadline to double for large portals where technical infeasibility was shown, and it required an accessibility symbol on entry pages. Brazil's public-sector web duty is twenty-two years old. What Article 63 added in 2015 was private companies.

Three technical documents now sit under a statute that names none of them. ABNT NBR 17225, first edition dated 11 March 2025, is the web content and applications standard, and it is built on WCAG 2.2. ABNT NBR 17060, published on 26 October 2022, is the mobile app standard. It carries 54 requirements across perception and understanding, control and interaction, media, and coding, and covers native Android and iOS apps, web apps, and hybrid apps. And eMAG, the government's own model, is still at version 3.1 from April 2014, built on WCAG 2.0, made mandatory for federal sites by a 2007 ministerial order. Nobody has withdrawn eMAG. So a federal supplier following it to the letter is working two WCAG versions behind the national standard published last year, and the government's own page lists both as live references without saying which wins.

This applies to you if…

You maintain a website for a company headquartered in Brazil. Size makes no difference at all. Article 63 has no small-business threshold in it.
You have commercial representation in Brazil without a Brazilian legal entity, because Article 63 reaches representation and not only incorporation. That is a wider net than most national laws cast, and it catches companies that assume they are offshore.
You are a Brazilian public body at federal, state, or municipal level, in which case the same website duty lands on you directly, and a 2004 decree already landed on you two decades ago.
You send bills. Article 62 sits immediately before the website article and gets skipped everywhere. A person with a disability is entitled, on request, to receive bills, payment slips, receipts, statements, and tax demands in an accessible format. For a bank, a utility, or a telco, that is harder work than Article 63. It needs a request-handling process, not a one-time build.

What it technically requires

Make the site usable and put the symbol on it. Article 63 asks for accessibility to the information available, and its first paragraph asks for the accessibility symbol displayed prominently. Article 64 then ties the duty to money, because accessibility under Article 63 has to be observed to obtain the federal financing the law provides for elsewhere.
Test to WCAG 2.2 Level A and AA, and you can say so with the Brazilian standard's own words behind you. NBR 17225 defines regular conformance as meeting all its requirements, and says in terms that regular conformance aligns with WCAG 2.2 Level AA. So a site in regular conformance with the Brazilian standard also conforms to WCAG 2.2 Levels A and AA. Full conformance goes further and picks up the recommendations too, with a reasonable justification needed for any recommendation you skip. Every clause in the standard carries the WCAG success criterion number and level it maps to, which makes it traceable rather than mysterious.
Follow eMAG if you are building for the federal government, and know what you are inheriting. A 2007 ministerial order made it mandatory for Brazilian government sites and portals, by placing it inside the federal IT administration system. It has sat at version 3.1 since April 2014, on a WCAG 2.0 base. It was written deliberately for Brazilian priorities and excludes no WCAG good practice. It also sits two WCAG versions behind what NBR 17225 adopts, so build to 2.2 and you satisfy both.
Cover the app separately if you ship one, because Brazil wrote a separate standard for it. NBR 17060 came first, in October 2022, and was Brazil's first digital accessibility standard of any kind. Its scope includes websites accessed from mobile devices, so the two standards overlap at the edges rather than dividing neatly, and the safe read is that a native app needs testing against NBR 17060 rather than against the web standard alone.
Weigh cost against duty using Brazil's own formula rather than an imported one. Article 3 defines reasonable adaptation as the adaptations, modifications, and adjustments that do not impose a disproportionate and undue burden. That is the Brazilian version of the test you will meet in Japanese and European law, and it is the wording a Brazilian court will use if you argue a fix is too expensive.

All roads lead to WCAG. Start with Level AA, the legal standard or the full 55-rule library. Unfamiliar term along the way? The A to Z glossary decodes it.

How it is enforced

Article 63 carries no penalty of its own, and that is not our inference. The Chamber of Deputies said so in the reasoning behind a bill written to add one, describing the absence of sanctions as leaving the norm ineffective. That bill, PL 4238/21, would add a warning with a deadline to correct, a daily fine calculated on company revenue, and suspension of the website for a set period. It cleared committee in 2022. We could not trace what has happened to it since, and if it passes this section needs rewriting.

So enforcement borrows its machinery from elsewhere, and this is the part a business owner actually needs. ABNT standards are voluntary on their own terms, and the standard says so in its own foreword. Laws, decrees, and regulations take precedence over any ABNT document. A voluntary standard becomes binding on you in three ways. A contract that cites it makes it binding. So does the consumer code, where your site or app is a product or service offered in the consumer market. So does a court adopting it, which is exactly what happened in July 2026. The Ministério Público brings public civil actions, and one can end in a conduct adjustment agreement, a binding commitment to fix named problems by a named date instead of a straight court fight. How often web accessibility actions land there is something no source we read counts.

The current case is against the government itself. On 10 June 2026 a federal prosecutor in São Paulo filed a public civil action against the Union. It demands four things. Regulate Article 63 within 60 days, present a transition plan for federal websites within 120 days, apply ABNT NBR 17225:2025, and pay collective moral damages of at least R$144 million. Part of the evidence is a federal audit court review of 366 federal public organisations, which found 88.5% had websites rated poor for accessibility, and only 1.74% reaching regular or better. Eleven years of an unregulated statute is what that number looks like from the inside.

On 8 July 2026 the court granted interim relief, giving the Union 180 days to present its digital accessibility plan under a daily fine of R$10,000, and naming ABNT NBR 17225:2025 as the applicable standard. Read that as a signal rather than as a rule that binds you directly. A Brazilian federal court has now treated the 2025 standard as the measure of Article 63, in a case about government sites, with a private-sector duty sitting in the same article. Test to NBR 17225. Keep the evidence. Put the symbol up.

Key dates

Jul 6, 2015Law 13.146 enacted
Jan 2, 2016Law takes effect, including the website duty
2022ABNT NBR 17060 published, the national standard for mobile app accessibility
2025ABNT NBR 17225 published, the national standard for web content accessibility

What to do about it

Every obligation on this page is measured against WCAG, so the first step is knowing where you actually stand. Run the free 10-page scan for the machine-checkable slice. For the rest, we review the key journeys with an expert and a real blind screen-reader user, then attach a screenshot and a fix to every finding. $499, 5 business days.

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Orientation only, current as of August 2026. Not legal advice, and no attorney-client relationship is created. For your specific situation, talk to your own lawyer.