Accessibility laws · Israel

Israel: IS 5568

Israel put private websites under a real legal duty with money attached, and a claimant never has to prove anyone was hurt to collect on it. That reputation is earned. What almost nobody tells you is the rest of the regulation, which is full of written exceptions. A turnover figure decides whether your video needs captions at all. A certified auditor can sign off that a particular fix is technologically impossible. And a business trading through a social platform owes only whatever accessibility that platform already offers.

Statutory damages ceiling: ₪50,000
Proof required from plaintiff: No harm
WCAG via IS 5568: 2.0 AA
Regulations take effect: 2017

What the law is

Three layers stack up here, and flattening them into one is how most summaries go wrong. The duty starts with the Equal Rights for People with Disabilities Law, 5758-1998. The web-specific obligation then lives in Regulation 35 of the Service Accessibility Adjustments Regulations, 5773-2013, made under section 19L of that Law and published on 25 April 2013. And Regulation 35 never names a WCAG version. It points at the prevailing Israeli Standard on the effective date, which is Israeli Standard 5568, with a fallback to the W3C's own web content accessibility guidelines if no valid Israeli Standard exists. Most sources read IS 5568 as WCAG 2.0 Level AA and a few read it as 2.1. Because the reference moves with the standard rather than being pinned to a version, that disagreement is real rather than careless.

Regulation 35 covers more than a website, in its own words. The duty reaches a public service, or information about a public service, delivered through the internet, including documents, pages, applications, and all other information transferred through the internet. Applications are named in the regulation itself, so your app is not swept in by analogy. It is in the text. On the level, a public authority owes at least AA. Everyone else owes at least AA as well, subject to the undue burden provision in section 19L, and an entity that does get out of AA on undue burden still owes level A. There is a floor under this rather than an on-off switch.

The remedy is where the reputation comes from. Breaking the accessibility duty is a civil wrong under the 1998 Law, and an injured party can claim statutory damages up to ₪50,000 without proving any actual loss or injury. That figure is a ceiling on the claim, not a number that multiplies by each barrier on the page, and you will see it written the other way in plenty of places. The larger exposure is the one those summaries skip. The same breach can be brought as a class action, which turns one inaccessible checkout into a claim on behalf of everyone who ever met it.

This applies to you if…

You provide a public service, or information about a public service, to people in Israel over the internet. Commerce, booking, banking, a support portal, the PDF of your price list. If the public can use it online, Regulation 35 reaches it.
Your average annual turnover clears the exemption floor, and the figures are specific enough to check yourself against. Businesses averaging ₪300,000 or more counted as medium or large and ran on the October 2017 timetable. Below that, the exemption picture is the one thing on this page we are not going to state as settled, because our sources contradict each other and they are not all reading the same edition of the rules. The English-language guides describe a turnover-based exemption for existing sites that expired around 2020, leaving a much lower permanent floor. Hebrew-language material describes a small-business exemption that is still running, at a threshold indexed upward and quoted at over a million shekels. Those cannot both be right, and the gap between them decides whether a small Israeli business owes anything at all. Anyone near this line should get the current Hebrew text checked by an Israeli lawyer before deciding they are exempt, and should not rely on an English summary, ours included.
Your servers live outside Israel. Regulation 35(G) says the duty applies even where the hardware providing the internet service sits outside Israel's borders, so hosting abroad exempts nobody. Whether a foreign company with no Israeli presence is itself an obligated entity is a separate question, and nothing we could read answers it. A lot of guides say the duty follows the audience. We could not find that in the regulation, so we are not going to hand it to you as settled.
Your customer-facing service runs on a social network platform, in which case Regulation 35(G) asks less of you than you would guess. Where the service is provided through a platform such as Facebook, you apply the accessibility adjustments that platform makes available, setting the contrast being the example the regulation gives. Rebuilding somebody else's product is not your duty.

What it technically requires

Conform to IS 5568 across the service, and keep the date you did it. Regulation 109 is a safe harbour most owners never hear about. An entity that applied the version of the standard valid on its date of application has met its obligation, and that date includes the day you placed the order with your supplier. So a site built properly to the standard of its day does not fall into breach when the standard is revised underneath it.
Ship every new thing accessible on the day it opens. Regulation 35(E) says that once the original implementation window has closed, a new site, new pages, or newly added applications have to carry the adjustments by their opening or addition date. Accessibility is a launch condition here, not a follow-up ticket, which means the cheapest moment to deal with it is before the thing goes live.
Post a notice, in a prominent place on the site, describing the accessibility adjustments you have made. That is Regulation 35(H), and it comes after the work rather than instead of it. If you employ 25 or more people you also appoint an accessibility coordinator under Regulation 91, and you publish that person's contact details. The regulation is picky about who it can be. A managerial or project-coordination background where possible, at least a year of hands-on accessibility experience or Commission-approved training, and a person with a disability as far as that is possible. Employers under 100 people may appoint someone with less than a year behind them, and every coordinator gets updated annually.
Do not assume that notice satisfies a European accessibility statement, because the two documents do different jobs. Regulation 35(H) is written to come after the work, and what it describes is the adjustments you made. The European model, set by the EU Web Accessibility Directive and carried into every EU member state's law, is a declaration of your conformance status that has to name the parts of your site still failing and say why. One is a record of what you fixed. The other is a public account of what you have not. If you sell into both markets you need both, and the Israeli notice will not stand in for the European statement.
Read the places where Israel wrote its own version of WCAG, because there are three and they are all in Regulation 35. If applying success criterion 1.4.3 Contrast (Minimum) is impossible on expert opinion, you may offer an additional set of colors for a site with minimal contrast, and watermarks still have to keep clear contrast between text and background. For audio and video, the duty softens to providing as accurate an alternative as possible, as early as possible. And the AA duty does not require you to simplify language that is legal by nature. Contracts, quotations of law, and professional documents like architectural drawings and scientific reports all sit outside it. A public authority's own text still has to be as clear as the subject allows.
Know the three doors out, because Israel wrote all of them into the rules. A Service Accessibility Auditor, a certified role under the 1998 Law, can confirm in a written expert opinion that a particular adjustment is not achievable for technological reasons, and that opinion exempts you from that adjustment. The 2017 amendment lifted the video accessibility duty from any site that is not a public authority and turns over less than ₪5 million a year. And an entity outside the public sector that reached level A within one year of the effective date was treated as compliant from then on, which was a deliberate reward for moving early.

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.

This law expects a published accessibility statement, and regulators check for it first. Generate yours free →

How it is enforced

A claim runs as a civil wrong under the 1998 Law, and the claimant has to show the site fails the standard rather than that the failure hurt them. Statutory damages reach ₪50,000, New Israeli Shekels, as a ceiling on the claim. The same breach can be run as a class action, which is where the serious money sits. No source we could find publishes Israeli filing statistics, so anyone quoting you a claims trend for Israel is guessing.

Two Israeli sources describe a cure period that runs before a suit can start. Someone who finds an inaccessible site sends the owner a letter, and only if it has not been fixed 60 days later can they sue for statutory damages. We could not find that window in the translated text of the 2013 Regulations, so it most likely sits in the 1998 Law or a later amendment, and you are getting both the fact and its footing from us. If it holds, it changes the risk picture entirely, because it turns an automatic claim into a deadline you can beat.

The Commission for Equal Rights of Persons with Disabilities has sat inside the Ministry of Justice since August 2000. The 2013 Regulations hand it real jobs, including publishing the guidelines and approving the training accessibility coordinators take. Whether it can order one particular business to fix one particular website is something no source we read confirms. So treat private claims as the live risk in Israel, and the Commission as the body that sets and publishes the standard.

The defence that works here is a dated, documented test against IS 5568. This regime runs on evidence at every turn. A certified auditor's written opinion is what unlocks the technological-impossibility exemption, the posted notice is what shows the work was done, and a version-dated conformance record is exactly what Regulation 109 protects. Test it. Date it. Keep it.

Key dates

2013Accessibility regulations for internet services made
Oct 2017Regulations take effect for new, medium, and large businesses
Oct 2020Full application: pre-existing and small businesses now covered

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.

Order your audit Run the free scan

Primary sources

Other laws

Related on this site

What to read next, and the terms this page uses.

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.