Bench note
Writing an Accessibility Statement That Is Not a Fiction
Most accessibility statements are copied from a generator, claim conformance nobody measured, and give the reader no way to get help. Here is what an honest one contains.
Published 8 September 2026Re-measured 19 September 2026
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An accessibility statement is a page on your site saying what you have done about accessibility, what state things are currently in, and how someone who hits a barrier can reach a human being.
Almost none of them do that. The overwhelming majority are generated from a template, assert conformance to a standard nobody measured against, and end with a contact address that goes nowhere. They exist to be pointed at rather than read, which means they are addressed to a hypothetical adversary instead of to the person actually stuck on your booking form.
The useful version is different, and it is not harder to write. It is only harder to write dishonestly.
What not to claim
Start here, because the failure mode is a claim rather than an omission.
Do not write "this site is WCAG 2.1 AA compliant" unless somebody measured it. That is a testable statement about a specific set of success criteria. If nobody has tested against them, it is not a summary of your intentions — it is an assertion of fact that is probably untrue, published by you, in writing.
Do not write "fully accessible" or "accessible to all users". Nobody can support that. Accessibility is not a state a site reaches and holds; it is a property that degrades every time anyone publishes anything.
Do not claim an accessibility widget makes you conform. In January 2025 the US Federal Trade Commission announced a one million dollar settlement with the overlay vendor accessiBe over claims that its product could make any website WCAG compliant, and the final order bars the company from repeating that representation without evidence. Repeating a claim a regulator has taken action over, on your own site, under your own name, is not a defensive posture. The overlay page has the record.
Do not copy a public body's statement. Government statements are shaped by specific statutory duties with specific reporting requirements. Lifting one puts sentences on your site describing obligations and processes you do not have.
What an honest statement contains
- What you are aiming at
- What you have actually done
- What you know is not right yet
- How to get help
- What you will do about a report
- When it was last reviewed
Six parts. It can be short.
What you are aiming at
Name the standard and level you are working towards, framed as a target rather than an achievement. "We work towards WCAG 2.2 Level AA" is honest and useful. If you are doing this properly, say when you last reviewed the site against it.
What you have actually done
Specifics beat adjectives. "All images carry alternative text", "the site has been tested using keyboard navigation", "colour contrast has been measured against 4.5:1 for body text" — each of those is checkable, which is what makes them worth saying.
What you know is not right yet
This is the part everyone omits and the part that makes the page credible. If your archived PDFs are untagged, say so. If the booking system is a third-party embed you cannot fix, say so and say what you are doing about it. A statement that admits to three known problems is more trustworthy than one that admits to none, and it is far more useful to a reader deciding whether to bother.
How to get help
A real contact route, monitored, with an expectation of how quickly someone will respond. This is the entire point of the page. Someone who cannot complete a form on your site needs a way to reach a person, and "accessibility@" pointing at an unread mailbox is worse than no address at all because it consumes their time.
What you will do about a report
Say what happens when somebody tells you about a barrier. Who looks at it, roughly how quickly, and what you do if it cannot be fixed immediately — including whether there is an alternative way to complete the task.
When it was last reviewed
A date. An undated statement is unverifiable, and one that is obviously four years old tells the reader more than its contents do.
Where the statement lives
Link it from your footer on every page. That is where people look. Give it a plain URL that a person could guess.
And make the page itself accessible, which is a joke that writes itself and happens constantly. Real headings in order, no text baked into an image, contrast that clears the threshold, and a link to the contact route that is an actual link.
The builder angle
Most website builders will not produce a real statement for you, and you should be suspicious of anything that offers to.
Wix's Accessibility Wizard lists the accessibility statement among its manual tasks — the things it explicitly cannot do for you — which is the correct treatment. A statement is a set of claims about your site and your processes. A tool that generated one would be generating claims on your behalf about things it cannot observe.
If any platform or plugin offers to write your statement automatically, read what it produces very carefully before publishing it, and delete every sentence asserting a conformance level nobody measured.
A short template you can actually use
Accessibility at [site name]
>
We want everyone to be able to use this site, and we work towards WCAG 2.2 Level AA.
>
What we have done. [Specific, checkable things.]
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What we know is not right yet. [Honest list, with what you are doing about each.]
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If something does not work for you. Email [address]. We read it and we aim to reply within [period]. Tell us what page you were on and what you were trying to do, and if you can, what you were using — it helps us reproduce the problem.
>
Last reviewed: [date].
That is the whole thing. It takes twenty minutes and it is worth more than a generated page of conformance claims, because it addresses the person who needed the page.
And the standing caveat
This is not legal advice. In some jurisdictions and for some kinds of organisation, an accessibility statement is a specific legal requirement with prescribed content — that is true of public sector bodies in a number of countries — and if that applies to you, follow the applicable requirement rather than this page. What is written here is about writing an honest statement, which is a different question from satisfying a statutory duty.
What platform you are on affects how much of this you can support, and the assessment of ADA-compliant website builders covers what each one actually hands you.
Questions from the bench
Do I legally need an accessibility statement?
Should I say my site is WCAG compliant?
Is it bad to list known problems?
Where should the statement live?
Where this is filed
Every note here sits underneath one assessment: ADA-compliant website builders, which is where the platforms are read side by side. Nothing on this site is legal advice, and no builder on that page is sold as a route to compliance.
The recheck notice
When a platform quietly changes what it gives you
Builders move accessibility features without a changelog: a theme restyles its focus ring, a wizard learns a check, a field migrates to another panel. The recheck list is meant to carry one short note whenever a page here has to be corrected. It is not switched on yet, so this form keeps nothing — until it is, the re-measured date at the foot of each page is the record.