An accessibility statement is a short, clear explanation of how your product is designed to be usable by as many people as possible. It typically tells readers what you've done to make the product accessible, what's still a problem and how people can get help or report issues. Itt doesn't let you off the hook because it doesn't magically fix your product. I hope no one told you it would.
You might think that an accessibility statement is primarily for people with disabilities. Those who use screen readers, rely on keyboard navigation and need captions to consume your content need the most help to quickly figure out if your site will work for them. I disagree. The accessibility statement is for everyone who gives a damn, whether forced by law or genuinely motivated.
Yes, people with disabilities will refer to it to decide whether they can access the product and what problems they can expect. Teams use it to show what they are doing and to track their progress, or lack thereof. Lawyers use it as evidence of whether the company is taking accessibility seriously.
But I use it as well. I use it to understand if the company really cares about accessibility and people or if it's just a not-so-clever ruse. I use it to see if the statement matches reality when I test a product. I use it as a starting point for discussions and sometimes to push for things to be prioritised.
Since the accessibility statement is public, any promises made in there are public too. That matters more than people realise. Public commitments carry far more weight than closed-door discussions.
Sadly though, most accessibility statements are misleading. They're full of standard-speak and are a dead giveaway that whoever wrote them just used one of the many generators where you just plug in your company name, pick one of the levels of the WCAG and you're done. They look good on paper, but don't match real‑world experience. Utterly useless.
People publish these nice‑sounding promises ("we strive to be accessible"), but do nothing to fix known problems. When you use unedited, out‑of‑the‑box templates, that's a red flag for me that you haven't done any real accessibility testing.
This is more than a stylistic personal thing. In lawsuits, the statement could be used against you if the words on paper promise more than what your product delivers.
So does this mean accessibility statements are a legal requirement?
As the Germans say...yain! That's yes and no together for you!
Let's talk legal requirements tomorrow though.