An accessible website, built in Fürth

Plenty of websites look great. That does not mean everyone can actually use them.

People with low vision need enough contrast. People who do not use a mouse need solid keyboard navigation. People who are blind listen to the page through a screen reader.

If any of these basics is missing, the site is simply broken for those visitors.

Since mid-2025, accessibility is no longer a nice extra. For many businesses it is a legal requirement. For everyone else, it is just good craftsmanship.

This page covers who the law applies to, what makes a website accessible on a technical level, how a project runs, and what it costs if you are looking for someone in Fürth to handle it.

Who has to make their website accessible

Since 28 June 2025, Germany's Accessibility Strengthening Act (BFSG) has been in force. It mainly affects businesses that sell online to consumers.

The BFSG is Germany's implementation of the European Accessibility Act, which is based on EU Directive 2019/882. You can read the full directive on EUR-Lex. Other EU countries have their own national laws implementing the same directive.

The focus is on e-commerce services. That means online shops and booking platforms, but also banking services, e-books and passenger transport.

There is one important exemption.

Microenterprises that provide services are excluded. These are businesses with fewer than 10 employees and an annual turnover or balance sheet total of no more than 2 million Euro.

A simple brochure website with no way to buy anything usually falls outside the law. If you are not sure whether your case is covered, talk it through with a lawyer.

Public bodies have their own rules. In Germany, federal authorities follow BITV 2.0, while states and municipalities follow state law. In practice, both point to the same criteria.

A joint market surveillance authority of the German states checks for violations, and the law allows fines of up to 100,000 Euro.

The fine is not the main point, though. People with disabilities are not a small group, and older people with declining eyesight add to that number. A website that shuts them out loses customers.

What accessible web design actually means

Accessible web design follows WCAG, the guidelines published by the W3C. For the BFSG, the practical benchmark is WCAG 2.1 at level AA.

WCAG rests on four principles: content must be perceivable, operable, understandable and robust. That sounds abstract, but day to day it translates into very concrete things.

The full WCAG 2.1 specification lists every criterion in detail.

Contrast and colour

Regular text needs a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 against its background. Large text can get away with 3:1. Light grey text on a white background almost always fails.

Colour must never be the only way information is conveyed. A red border around a field does not, on its own, explain what went wrong.

Keyboard and screen readers

Every feature has to be reachable by keyboard: the menu, the forms, the cookie banner, everything. The focus indicator must stay visible throughout.

Screen readers read the page aloud, and to do that they rely on semantic HTML. Real headings, real buttons, real lists. A plain div with a click handler stays silent to them.

Images and media

Informative images need alt text that describes the content, not the file name. Purely decorative images get an empty alt attribute so they are skipped. Videos need captions.

The good news is that most of this adds very little cost to a new build. It just has to be part of the plan from day one.

Accessibility only gets expensive when it is bolted on afterwards.

From audit to launch: how the project works

It starts with an honest assessment. It ends with a tested website and an accessibility statement.

For an existing site, everything begins with an audit. Automated tools like Lighthouse or axe spot missing alt text in minutes and flag weak contrast just as quickly. But they only catch part of the problem.

The rest is manual work.

That means going through the entire site without a mouse, then a pass with NVDA on Windows and another with VoiceOver on macOS and iOS. Zooming to 200 percent is part of the test as well.

Only then does it become clear whether forms and menus really work.

Next comes the build. The design is created in Figma with contrast that works from the start, and the code gets a clean, semantic structure.

With WordPress, the theme matters too. Many off-the-shelf themes and plugins fall apart under keyboard use. You can read more about the right setup on the WordPress website page.

Before launch, there is a final test against WCAG 2.1 AA, followed by the accessibility statement.

For public bodies in Germany it is mandatory under BITV, and the BFSG also requires providers to publish information on how accessible their service is. The statement describes the testing status and known limitations, and it gives visitors a way to send feedback.

Launch is not the finish line. New content needs alt text again, and a plugin update can quietly break keyboard navigation.

Retrofit or relaunch, and what it costs

Not every older website needs a rebuild. The audit shows whether a retrofit is enough.

A typical scenario: the site is technically sound, but contrast is weak and alt text is missing. A retrofit often does the job here. Adjust the colours, describe the images, label the forms.

It is a different story with an outdated site builder or a bloated theme. If the underlying structure is not semantic, patching it up gets expensive.

In that case a relaunch is often the cheaper route. It delivers accessibility, speed and a fresh design in one go.

A word on plugins that promise accessibility at the push of a button. They add a toolbar on top of the page but leave the code underneath untouched. That is not enough for WCAG 2.1 AA.

Now to cost. On the market, a small website with up to 5 pages runs 1,500 to 3,500 Euro. A business website with 5 to 12 pages costs 4,000 to 9,000 Euro. A relaunch falls somewhere between 3,000 and 25,000 Euro.

Accessibility specialists typically charge 120 to 180 Euro per hour.

My hourly rate is 100 to 120 Euro excluding VAT. I bill website projects at a fixed price, which I quote after our first conversation. The details are on the fixed-price web design page.

Why a freelancer in Fürth

Accessibility lives in the details. A single point of contact keeps those details together.

At an agency, a project often passes through several hands: concept, design, development, testing. Every handover is a chance for a requirement to slip. A contrast issue here, a missing form label there.

As a freelancer, I handle design, code and testing myself. No agency overhead, no project manager in between.

You talk directly to the person writing the code.

I have been building for the web for over 20 years, starting with table layouts in Dreamweaver. Back then, accessibility rarely came up. Today it is simply part of the craft.

Fürth and Nuremberg sit right next to each other, so meeting in person is easy to arrange. For everything else, a video call works fine.

You can find out more about working together on the web design in Fürth page.

Maybe you are not sure yet whether the BFSG applies to you, or how your current site measures up. A first assessment often takes just 15 to 30 minutes.

Honest advice, no sales pressure. Let's talk.