Website Accessibility Under Standard 5568: What the Law Requires

The button in the corner is not the answer

Almost every Israeli website with an accessibility button in the corner assumes it is covered. Most are not. The widget solves a real part of the problem, and precisely not the part that demand letters are written about.

The difference between the two is neither legal nor complicated, and it is worth the half hour it takes to understand.

What the law requires, in plain business terms

The requirement in Israel is that a site meets Israeli Standard 5568 at level AA. That standard is based on the accepted international one, and it speaks about the site itself: its structure, its colours, its forms, and how it can be operated.

Note the word "itself". The standard does not talk about a helper tool bolted on top of the site. It talks about the site.

What an accessibility widget does do

To be fair, it does real and useful things:

• Larger text and line spacing for visitors with mild visual impairment.
• Contrast and greyscale modes.
• Stopping animation, which is critical for some users.
• Highlighting links and enlarging the cursor.

These are genuine comfort improvements for a genuine audience, and they earn their place. The problem starts when they are treated as an insurance certificate.

What it does not do, and what people get sued over

Three things no widget in the world will fix for you:

Contrast that was decided in the design

If your primary button is light grey text on a light background, no toggle truly fixes that. The widget's contrast mode changes the entire page at once and usually breaks the layout. The real fix is choosing colours that meet the required ratio in the first place.

Keyboard navigation

Some people do not use a mouse. They move between elements with the Tab key. If your menu only opens on hover, if a dialog cannot be closed without a click, or if focus gets stuck inside a component and never leaves, the site is unusable for them. A widget does not touch this at all.

Forms without labels

A field with only placeholder text inside the box, and no real label behind it, is announced by a screen reader as "text box" with no explanation. It is one of the most common failures, and also one of the easiest to fix, but only in code.

The two cheap things everyone forgets

These are not technical improvements, they are requirements, and they cost almost nothing:

• An accessibility statement. A page describing what was done, what is still not accessible, and which level the site meets. It must be reachable from every page.
• An accessibility coordinator. A named person with contact details, who can be reached about a problem. Their details appear in the statement.

These are the first two items checked when someone is looking for a non compliant site, because they are visible and not arguable. A site without a statement flags itself.

What to check before launch

A short list you can run on any site, with no special tools:

1. Navigate the whole page using only the Tab key. Can you reach everything? Can you get out of everything?
2. Check that you can always see where focus is. A too faint outline is a failure.
3. Zoom the browser to 200 percent. Is text cut off? Do headings overlap?
4. Narrow the window to a small phone width. Is there horizontal scrolling? That is a failure.
5. Confirm every form field is tied to a real label.
6. Confirm every informative image has alternative text, and every decorative image has empty alternative text.

An automated scan will catch some of this, and roughly a third of its findings will be noise. Keyboard navigation and focus visibility are things no scanner will check for you.

Why it is worth doing even without the law

Every one of these fixes, without exception, improves the site for everyone else too. Good contrast reads better in sunlight. A labelled form autofills correctly. A correct heading structure helps search engines understand the page. Accessibility is not a tax, it is building properly.