Digital accessibility explained – why is it important and who does it matter to?
Accessible to all – also online.
Digital content must be accessible to everyone – regardless of physical, temporary or situational limitations. This text shows what accessibility means, who it affects and how it can be implemented.
Index
What is digital accessibility?
Digital accessibility means that digital products – such as websites, online shops or apps – can be found, accessed and used by everyone, including people with disabilities, in the usual way, without any particular difficulty and, in principle, without outside help (Section 4 of the German Federal Act on Equal Opportunities for Persons with Disabilities (BGG)).
There should be no barriers that prevent the use of the entire product or individual parts of it.
All people are different and have different approaches, needs and abilities. A barrier-free digital product must therefore be designed in such a way that it can be used by the widest possible range of people with different abilities.
This means that the way a product is designed and the abilities of a user to perceive and operate it must match.
If these two aspects do not match perfectly, there will be a discrepancy at the interface between the user and the computer, and barriers will arise that exclude a person from using a product.
This is where the principles of inclusive design come into play when designing offers. We have to try to design our products so that they can be used by as many different groups of users as possible.
Who needs digital accessibility?
The people who depend on digital accessibility are just as diverse as the reasons why.
And it affects more people than we think.
People with disabilities
First and foremost, accessibility is essential for people with disabilities.
They urgently need accessibility to be taken into account when designing products. Otherwise, it is very likely that the product will contain barriers that do not affect the “ideal standard user” and therefore do not stand out as a problem during development. For people with disabilities, however, the product is unusable because their needs were not considered during the planning. A major aspect here is keyboard operability. Most people use a mouse, and so it often goes unnoticed if the site can only be operated with a mouse and other input options do not work.
What is disability?
According to the German Social Security Code, disability is defined as a physical, mental, intellectual or sensory impairment that can prevent a person from participating equally for more than six months due to interactions with environmental barriers. (Source: § 2 SGB IX – Einzelnorm)
How many people are affected?
According to the figures of the Federal Statistical Office, around 7.9 million people in Germany have a recognized severe disability. Severe disability is defined as a degree of disability (GDB) of at least 50 percent.
That alone is around 10 percent of the population.
If a disability is present much earlier, the group of people affected is larger:
In Germany, more than a third of people aged 18 and over (36.1 percent) live with an impairment that limits them in their daily activities. (Source: GBE – Restrictions in daily activities (aged 18 and over) )
People with temporary impairments
People with disabilities therefore have a permanent impairment of their abilities in an individual way. Impairments are not always visible.
In addition to permanent impairments – such as blindness, hearing loss or paralysis – there are also temporary impairments.
A broken arm is an example of a temporary impairment.
Although the cause of the impairment is not a disability, there is no difference between temporary and permanent impairments in terms of their effect, namely that the arm cannot be used for the duration of the healing process.
If a product is designed so that it can be operated by a person with one arm, this helps in both cases, regardless of the cause of the impairment.
People with situational impairments
In addition to permanent and temporary impairments, there are also situational impairments. These are everyday situations that any of us can find ourselves in, which make the circumstances in which we have to perform our tasks more difficult.
One example that everyone has probably experienced at some point is a reflective cell phone display in bright sunshine. We would like to see the information in the app, but the text does not stand out sufficiently from the background, making reading very difficult.
Or we have to fill out a long and complex form under great time pressure. In this situation, too, it helps if the design has been optimized for accessibility: the form is structured in a comprehensible way, offers support with input and help with error correction, so that we can complete our task more easily.
Why is accessibility important?
As the wide range of situations and impairments show, accessibility is not just an issue for a niche group, but affects us all.
Products that have been designed and implemented in accordance with the principles of accessibility reach more people.
They can be used by people with disabilities who are dependent on accessibility. In addition, they offer advantages for all users.
One example of this is videos with subtitles. The subtitles are essential for deaf and hard of hearing people to be able to understand the spoken content.
But they are not the only ones to benefit: data from the UK shows that 85 percent of Netflix users now have subtitles switched on while they watch. This may be because they are learning a foreign language and the subtitles help them to do so, or because they can concentrate less on the plot if they can read along. (Source: Netflix and Captions.)
Accessibility is good for SEO: search engines can also be thought of as blind users. They can capture text content and all other content only if it has suitable text alternatives. In addition, the semantic structure of the page is machine-readable. A page that is designed to be accessible and in which semantics have also been taken into account is rated better by Google.
Also important, but should not be the only driver: legal requirements.
In recent years, the legal framework for the requirements for digital products has also been changing increasingly.
Public bodies have had to meet legal requirements for accessibility since 2021. In the private sector, the Barrier-Free Strengthening Act (BFSG) will come into force on June 28, 2025. This means that accessibility is increasingly coming to the attention of the public and in the foreseeable future it will be a competitive disadvantage to ignore the issue.
How is accessibility to be implemented?
First of all: digital accessibility is not rocket science!
A product must be designed in such a way that there are different ways and means of accessing and interacting with it. And it must be understandable.
Digital accessibility is the result of paying attention to many individual aspects and small points, not all of which are relevant for all user groups, but which, taken together, make the product usable for many different people with a wide range of abilities.
The earlier in the development process we consider accessibility, the better we can implement it.
Barrier-free design can also be compared to building a house: if the house is finished and you then decide that it would be nice to have a cellar, it will be difficult and expensive. If accessibility is considered from the very beginning of the product development process, it is much cheaper than making changes at the end.
The diverse requirements that arise from accessibility can be found in norms and standards, which are also referred to in legislation on accessibility. Both in the public sector since 2021 and in the private sector from June 2025.
These include EN 301 549 (e-accessibility requirements for ICT products and services) and WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines).
The most important step at the beginning: accessibility needs a mandate!
Accessibility is a team effort that can only be successfully mastered through the collaboration of all parties involved in the software development process. Each role must contribute to the overall success with different tasks.
For most teams, the topic is new. And because there are so many different aspects to consider, it can be overwhelming and overwhelming at the beginning.
- Be clear about the goal you want to achieve or need to achieve. Are there legal regulations that need to be met? Which ones are they?
- Which parts of your offering are affected and how? Do you have documents or other content, such as video or audio, that you want to make accessible?
All further steps are derived from these considerations:
- Make the requirements visible from the outset. What does accessibility mean in relation to each individual feature? What needs to be done to achieve it?
- Do all parties involved have the knowledge they need? What steps are necessary to achieve the goal?
- Accessibility is a continuous process, not a project with a fixed end date.
It must become an integral part of our daily work and accompany us throughout the entire product life cycle. - Even small improvements make a big difference. We don’t have to make everything perfect right away, just get a little better every day.
Author: Nadja Fecher, Accessibility Expert at Materna
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