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What an accessibility statement is and how CheckFox supports producing one.

What an accessibility statement is

A public declaration by a digital service of its conformance level with applicable accessibility law. In the EU, public-sector services and many private services are required to publish one.

The statement typically includes:

  • Name of the service
  • Conformance status (full, partial, non-compliant)
  • Scope of the audit
  • Known issues and exceptions
  • Date of audit and next review
  • Contact information for accessibility feedback
  • Enforcement procedure

See methodology / statement quality for what makes a good statement.

Statement template editor

A statement is rendered from a template, not typed into a form. CheckFox ships built-in templates; Pro and Enterprise workspaces can write their own in the template editor (Management > Templates), using %%variables%% drawn from the audit, the workspace and the linked accessibility plan. The preview names any variable that still has no value, and those placeholders stay visible in the document until they do.

Linking statement to audit

The statement is generated from the audit's findings. Failures and Derogations populate the issues section automatically, together with the notes written for the statement. What you change is the audit data and the template; the statement always reflects them as of the last publication. See methodology / using notes.

Linking to the accessibility plans

The regulation requires a statement to link to the organisation's multi-year accessibility plan and to the current year's action plan. A statement without those links is incomplete, whatever else it says.

In CheckFox you choose the multi-year plan on the statement; the current year is worked out at publication from whichever year contains today, so it does not have to be changed every January. Links to plans that are not published yet are left out rather than pointing readers at a page that does not exist.

Publishing

Publishing writes an immutable snapshot, one per language, numbered per document, and gives the statement a public address that stays the same across refreshes. Editing afterwards changes only what the next publication will say, and the app flags the published version as out of date until you refresh it.

A published statement can be unpublished, its public link can be rotated, and you can record where you published your own copy so search engines treat that one as canonical.

The public address is a convenience and a canonical source. The legal obligation is to publish on the organisation's own site, which is what the download is for: a standalone file with no scripts, ready to host.

Publishing is available on every plan, including Free.

Where it lives in the UI

  • Audit page > Statements tab. One audit can carry more than one statement.

Related

Last reviewed: 2026-09-03