Accessibility Statement Lint (EU model)

An accessibility statement is a public legal document. Under Directive (EU) 2016/2102 every public sector website in the EU must publish one, and the Commission's model statement fixes what has to be in it: a commitment sentence, the legal basis, a scope, exactly one compliance status, a list of non-accessible content sorted into three reason categories, a date of preparation with the method used, a date of last review, a feedback channel and an enforcement procedure. Directive (EU) 2019/882, the European Accessibility Act, pushed the same habit onto private-sector services.

Monitoring bodies sample published statements. They do not read your code first — they read this page, and the fastest thing to check on it is a date.

This extension reads the statement file you already published and reports what the model statement asks for and your file does not have.

What it checks

19 checks run over the open file:

• the commitment sentence, the legal basis, and the scope of the statement
• the compliance status wording, and whether two different statuses appear in one file
• whether EN 301 549 is named, and whether the cited version is older than V3.2.1, the version listed in the Official Journal for the Web Accessibility Directive
• whether a partially or not compliant status is backed by a Non-accessible content section, and whether that section sorts its items into the three reason categories the model uses
• whether a disproportionate burden claim carries an assessment behind it and offers an accessible alternative, as Article 5 requires
• the date of preparation, the method used, and whether the date is in the future
• the date of last review, and whether it is more than 12 months old
• the feedback channel and the enforcement procedure
• template placeholders that were never filled in

Measured on the two files in this repository

_fixtures/clean.md is a complete statement for a fictional municipality: 0 findings. _fixtures/dirty.md is the kind of statement a chat assistant produces when asked for one: 8 findings, 7 of them high severity. Among them, two compliance statuses in one file, an unfilled [insert your organisation name] placeholder, a disproportionate burden claim with neither an assessment nor an alternative, and a last review date 30 months old.

How to run it

Open a statement file and run Accessibility Statement: Check This File from the command palette. Findings appear in the Problems panel on the line they belong to.

Free and paid

Checking the file open in the editor is free and finishes the job for a single statement. The licensed version sweeps every locale and sub-site statement in the workspace at once and writes a dated report with a per-file verdict.

Yardstick

A consultant charges $150-$250 an hour to review one statement; a full agency accessibility audit starts around $2,500.

More

Reference and the free browser version: https://getreadystack.com/tools/accessibility-statement-lint