Accessibility laws · Switzerland

Switzerland: Disability Discrimination Act (BehiG)

A private Swiss business sits inside the disability discrimination act, and a Swiss customer still cannot make it fix its website. That is this jurisdiction in one sentence. Article 6 of BehiG bans private providers of public services from discriminating on the ground of disability, and Article 8 gives the person on the wrong end of that exactly one remedy. They can ask a court for compensation, which Article 11 caps at CHF 5,000. No injunction lies against a private Swiss website. A revision now before Parliament would change that, and it cannot take effect before 2027.

BehiG in force: 2004
Swiss standard: eCH-0059
WCAG version referenced: 2.1 AA
Cantons legislating separately: 26

What the law is

BehiG, the Bundesgesetz über die Beseitigung von Benachteiligungen von Menschen mit Behinderungen, was passed on 13 December 2002 and came into force on 1 January 2004. Its internet provision is Article 14(2), and it is narrower than most summaries admit. It speaks to the authorities, it covers services they offer on the internet, and on its own terms it names one group of people. The visually impaired. What it also does is hand the Federal Council power to issue the necessary technical regulations and to declare a private organisation's standard binding, and that clause is the hinge everything else swings on. The broader duty lives in the implementing Ordinance instead. Article 10 of BehiV requires information, communication, and transaction services over the internet to be accessible to people with speech, hearing, visual, and motor impairments, and it points at the W3C's guidelines by name.

eCH-0059 is the technical standard, and it is not a government document. It comes from eCH, a private association. Version 3.0 was approved on 4 June 2020 and published on 25 June that year. It requires conformance to WCAG 2.1 at level AA, and as far as we can establish no version 4.0 exists yet. eCH standards are written as recommendations. So the date that matters is 21 May 2021, when the federal ICT steering body adopted version 3.0 as a binding requirement for public-sector technology, using exactly the power sitting in Article 14(2). Be careful with what you read about that year, because a lot of sources compress two facts into one. BehiG did not become binding on the public sector in 2021. It has bound the authorities since 2004. What changed in 2021 was the standard, not the statute.

eCH-0059 asks for considerably more than WCAG 2.1 AA, and this is where Switzerland stops resembling anyone else. It sets out six areas. Websites and mobile applications at WCAG 2.1 Level AA. Published documents, all of them, with PDF/UA recommended for PDFs. Native apps, where the standard points builders at Apple's and Android's own accessibility guidance. An accessibility statement that is regularly updated, easy to find, and in a format that is both accessible and machine-readable. A feedback mechanism carrying three separate functions, one to report a problem, one to ask a question, and one to make a formal application. And alternative forms of communication, which has no WCAG equivalent anywhere, because it requires central areas of life and information to be available in Easy Language and in sign language video.

This applies to you if…

You are a private business offering services to the public in Switzerland, which puts you inside BehiG whether anyone told you so or not. Article 3 brings services of private parties that are in principle available to anyone into the Act's scope, and Article 6 forbids you from discriminating against disabled people on the ground of their disability. What that actually gets a customer is covered further down. It is the part worth reading.
You are a Swiss federal body, or you provide services on behalf of one. The Ordinance also splits up who writes the guidelines. Federal administrative units answer to the IT council and the Federal Chancellery. Organisations and undertakings operating under a federal concession issue guidelines for their own fields, and that is where transport operators and broadcasters sit.
You are a canton, a commune, a state-related enterprise, a university, a school, a hospital, or a library. Cantons legislate separately, and Article 4 lets them go further than federal law but never weaker, so the duty varies across the 26 of them. eCH-0059's own scope statement then reaches everyone who recognises it as binding, at every federal level, which means a canton that has adopted the standard sits on the same technical bar as Bern.
You export into the EU, where the European Accessibility Act reaches you regardless of Switzerland's position outside the union, because the Act follows the market sold into rather than the country of establishment. Microenterprises providing services are exempt from the service accessibility requirements and the obligations attached to them, which matters to a lot of small Swiss exporters and gets left out of most summaries.

What it technically requires

Meet eCH-0059 for federal services, which in practice means WCAG 2.1 Level AA. The Ordinance frames it as building to international IT standards, in particular the W3C's guidelines, and only subsidiarily to national ones. It also requires those guidelines to be developed alongside disability organisations, and kept current with the state of the art.
Make the documents accessible too, not only the pages around them. eCH-0059 says every published document has to be accessible under WCAG 2.1, and recommends PDF/UA, the ISO standard for accessible PDFs, as the route for PDFs specifically. For native and hybrid mobile apps it asks for WCAG conformance and recommends following the operating system vendors' own accessibility guidelines while you build.
Publish an accessibility statement that a machine can read, which is a requirement almost no other guidance mentions. eCH-0059 wants it regularly updated, easy to find, and in an accessible and machine-readable format. Alongside it you need a feedback mechanism with three functions rather than one contact form. A way to report a barrier, a way to ask a question, and a way to make an application.
Provide central information in Easy Language and in sign language video. That requirement has no equivalent in WCAG at any level, and it applies to the central areas of life and information. For further areas, Easy Language and sign language come in within the bounds of proportionality, and for general public information the standard recommends taking both into account. Switzerland treats these as duties, not extras.
Have an alternative ready for the cases where a fix is not ordered, because Swiss law builds one in. A court weighs whether the expected benefit to disabled people is out of proportion to the economic cost, to environmental, nature, and heritage protection interests, or to traffic and operational safety. Where it declines to order removal, it has to oblige the concession-holder or public body to offer a reasonable substitute solution. The Ordinance carries a related on-request duty as well. A person with a speech, hearing, or visual impairment can ask a federal body for the measures they need to visit and communicate with the people responsible.

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

The remedy you get depends entirely on who wronged you, and the gap is enormous. A person disadvantaged by a public body or by a concession-holder can demand that the disadvantage be removed or not repeated. A person discriminated against by a private service provider under Article 6 gets none of that. Their single remedy is an application to a court for compensation, and Article 11 caps it at CHF 5,000, with the court weighing the circumstances, the severity, and the value of the service. So Swiss law can make a government fix its site. It cannot make a shop fix a checkout. That gap is the point. Oversight of the federal duty sits with the Federal Office for Equality for People with Disabilities, founded in 2004 alongside the Act.

Bringing the claim costs nothing, which changes who realistically can. Article 10 makes proceedings free unless a party behaves wilfully or frivolously. Disability organisations also have standing, on conditions the page used to skip. They have to be of nationwide significance, have existed for at least ten years, be designated by the Federal Council, and be acting on a disadvantage that affects a large number of disabled people. We should also say what we could not find. No Swiss case brought over an inaccessible website turned up in anything we read.

The revision is the story to watch, and it would rewrite this whole page. The Federal Council sent its message to Parliament on 23 December 2024. The draft would oblige private providers of publicly accessible offerings, online ones in particular, to take suitable and reasonable measures to prevent, reduce, or eliminate discrimination. The named categories run to online shops, restaurants, hotels, sports stadiums, retailers, internet providers, self-service apps, mobile apps with end-user access, and digital communication services. Refusing a simple measure could itself be a rights violation under it. The draft points at WCAG level AA and at eCH-0059 without pinning a version, and entry into force is described as no earlier than 2027.

Until then, the sharp exposure for a Swiss company is the European market rather than the Swiss courts. The EAA has applied since 28 June 2025 to e-commerce, consumer banking, electronic communications, access to audiovisual media, air, bus, rail, and waterborne passenger transport, and e-books. It also covers products, including consumer computer hardware and operating systems, self-service terminals such as payment terminals, ATMs, ticketing and check-in machines, e-readers, and equipment for reaching audiovisual media. Sell any of that into the EU from Switzerland and the obligation is real, with a national regulator and a national penalty behind it.

Key dates

Jan 1, 2004BehiG takes effect, naming websites explicitly
2020eCH-0059 updated to reference WCAG 2.1
Jun 28, 2025European Accessibility Act applies to Swiss firms selling into the EU

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.