Web Accessibility Statement Example/Template

(Updated for 2024)

Publishing an accessibility statement is a best practice for compliance with digital accessibility laws and regulations.

And depending on the size of your organization and/or number of digital assets, creating an accessibility policy is highly recommended.

Many people use the terms accessibility policy and accessibility statement interchangeably, but they’re distinct documents so in this guide we’ll go over the differences between the two documents.

Towards the end, I’ll provide links where you can download templates to both documents for free.

Note that there is no exact right way to write a policy or statement, but there are essential sections necessary for both documents.

Accessibility Policy

A policy is an internal document that organizes and directs an organization’s approach to accessibility.

Policies are usually reserved for larger organizations or organizations with several digital assets. Small businesses and/or single website owners typically won’t use a policy.

A policy includes information such as:

• Roles and responsibilities
• Digital assets and projects
• Standards used
• Procedures and processes outlines
• Deadlines
• Training requirements
• Procurement selection criteria
• Other relevant sections.

Because these details are mostly for internal use (e.g., our roles and responsibilities are irrelevant to people visiting our website), we publish an accessibility statement on our website.

Accessibility Statement

An accessibility statement carries forward the relevant information from the policy to the public.

To illustrate, our audience doesn’t need to know our process for reviewing support requests (contained in the policy), but they do need to know how to contact our organization to receive support.

An accessibility statement will usually include the following items:

• statement of commitment.
• at least one method of contact for support
• at least one method of contact for feedback
• practical information that may help with using the website (e.g., issues specific to Microsoft Explorer
• Other relevant sections

Templates

I offer customizable templates for both documents at Accessible.org. You can use the templates as example frameworks to base your documents off of.

My accessibility statement template is available to download for free.

My accessibility policy template is available to download for free with a professional email subscription.