The accessibility widget won't solve your compliance problem

Bottom right corner of the website: a little blue figure. Click it, bigger text, high contrast, done, accessible. That is the pitch. Sadly, nothing has actually been fixed.

Germany's Accessibility Strengthening Act (BFSG), which implements the European Accessibility Act, has applied since 28 June 2025. Since then, a whole market for quick fixes has sprung up. The bestseller is the overlay widget: a script that sits on top of your site and promises to make it accessible. Monthly subscription, one line of code, box ticked.

What a widget cannot do

The most common barriers on the web have been the same for years. In February 2026, the WebAIM Million 2026 report ran automated checks on the home pages of one million websites. The six most common issues account for 96 percent of all errors found:

• low-contrast text (on 83.9 percent of home pages)
• images without alternative text (53.1 percent)
• form fields without labels (51 percent)
• empty links and empty buttons
• missing page language

According to WebAIM, these have been the same six issues for seven years. None of them is a display problem you can paint over from the outside. Alt text has to describe what is in the picture and why it is there. A form field needs a label that belongs to it. A button needs a name. Those are decisions in content and templates. A script can guess. It cannot know.

On top of that, many people who rely on accessibility already use their own tools: a screen reader, system zoom, their own contrast settings. A second control panel on your website does not replace any of that. It is just one more thing they have to operate.

A regulator has already checked the marketing

In the US, the Federal Trade Commission went through exactly this. In January 2025 it alleged that overlay vendor accessiBe falsely claimed its AI widget could make any website WCAG-compliant, and that it dressed up paid articles as independent reviews. In April 2025 the order became final: one million dollars, and no more such claims without evidence to back them.

That is not a German ruling, and different law applies here. But it shows how a regulator judged the promise "one line of code and you are compliant" once it looked closely.

Who is watching in Germany

In Germany, the joint market surveillance authority of the federal states (MLBF) in Magdeburg is in charge. According to a press release from the state of Saxony-Anhalt dated 1 June 2026, it has been operating since September 2025. It follows up on complaints and also runs its own checks based on set priorities. Its remit includes digital services in e-commerce, banking and passenger transport.

And the cease-and-desist letters? Whether competitors can even send formal warnings over BFSG violations has not yet been decided by any court, according to an overview from 8 September 2026. If a lawyer's letter lands on your desk, have it checked before you pay. That is no reason to relax. It is a reason to put the money into the site rather than into a subscription.

Our take

Accessibility is not a feature you switch on afterwards. It is a property of the site, like load time or good copy. Buying a widget mostly buys a good feeling. The screen reader still won't get through your checkout.

The good news: the work is more manageable than it sounds. Most errors live in a handful of building blocks repeated across the whole site. Fix a button in the template and it is fixed on every page.

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Your step for this week: Open your most important flow, such as the contact form, checkout or booking, and put the mouse away. Go through it using only the keyboard: Tab, Shift+Tab, Enter, Space. Can you always see where you are? Can you get all the way to submit? If not, you have found your first real fix. No widget in the world would have shown it to you.

At MED1A we build accessibility into websites from the start, not as an add-on. If you want to know where your site stands, we reply within two working days.