Joomla is neither accessible nor inaccessible on its own. The project targets WCAG 2.1 AA and ships an accessible default template, but what your visitors get is decided by the template you actually run, its overrides, your extensions and your articles [5][8]. This page separates what Joomla gives you from what stays your job, on a club site or a shop.
Does the BFSG apply to your Joomla site?
It depends on what the site does. The BFSG covers listed services to consumers: e-commerce, banking, telecoms, e-books and passenger transport. If you sell to consumers through a shop extension – VirtueMart and HikaShop are common examples – you provide an e-commerce service, a "Dienstleistung im elektronischen Geschäftsverkehr" (§ 1(3) no. 5 BFSG), and the law has applied to it since 28 June 2025. It transposes the European Accessibility Act, so selling into other EU countries brings equivalent national laws there [1][2].
Micro-enterprises that provide services are exempt: fewer than 10 employees and an annual turnover or balance sheet total of no more than €2 million (§ 2 no. 17, § 3(3) BFSG) [1]. Both conditions must be met; details are on our page on the micro-enterprise exemption. A purely B2B shop is not a service to consumers.
A club's or company's information site with no consumer transactions is generally not itself one of the listed services – but a booking or order function on it can be. Municipalities and other public bodies fall under BITV 2.0 instead, with its own statement and feedback duties. The full scope is in the BFSG and the European Accessibility Act; for shops, see BFSG for online shops.
What the platform gives you, and what it does not
You get:
- Cassiopeia as the default template. Since Joomla 4, Cassiopeia is the only default front-end template, built with a focus on accessibility – fonts, colour contrast, ARIA attributes – and drawing on the older Beez templates. Its menus, like those of the Atum admin template, use Metis Menu [5].
- A checker for editors. Since Joomla 4.1, the jooa11y accessibility checker is included as a system plugin [3][4]. It highlights content problems – skipped headings, missing alt text, vague links, tables without headers, contrast, missing labels – while an article is written [4][10].
- Skip links and language marking. A SkipTo plugin is on by default in the backend and can be enabled for the site; in the TinyMCE editor plugin you can define the languages you use and mark passages in another language [7].
- Customisation without forking. Cassiopeia takes a
user.css, template overrides in itshtmlfolder and child templates, so you can change output without editing core files [6]. - A stated target. Joomla currently targets WCAG 2.1 AA and is working towards 2.2 AA [8].
You do not get:
- Your template. Many sites run a commercial template or framework instead, whose markup is the vendor's.
- Accessible extensions. One extension that ignores accessibility can undo an accessible site, and the Joomla Extensions Directory holds no accessibility information about its entries – searching it for accessibility mostly turns up add-ons meant to fix inaccessible sites [8].
- A site check from jooa11y. It is not a code analysis tool and only highlights content issues [4]; it cannot check a whole site or produce a report [9], and it has to be enabled first [10].
- Accessibility from the toolbar plugin. Joomla also ships an optional "Additional Accessibility Features" plugin with font size, text spacing and colour controls. The Joomla Magazine authors who describe it say these settings and plugins "do not solve any accessibility problem on your site" [7].
What we find on Joomla sites
Commercial templates and frameworks
The template decides skip link, landmarks, focus styles and colours on every page. Commercial templates often remove the focus outline, set body text in light grey and render the logo as an unnamed image link. A colour scheme picked in the options can fail contrast even where the base template passed.
Overrides that stopped receiving fixes
Template overrides are copies of core or extension layouts; when core improves a layout, your copy stays as it was. On sites migrated across major versions, we find overrides that drop labels on search and login forms or render "Read more" without the article title.
Menus and mobile navigation
Cassiopeia's menu is a sound start. Third-party mega menus often open on hover only, use links as toggles and leave aria-expanded unset. In the mobile menu, focus stays behind the open panel.
Articles written in the editor
On club and municipal sites, editors produce most pages. Headings are chosen for size, tables pasted from Word, images placed without alt text, links say "here", and foreign-language passages stay unmarked. jooa11y would flag much of this – if it is switched on and somebody reads it.
Sliders, galleries and forms from extensions
Sliders autoplay without a pause control and have unlabelled arrow icons; lightboxes ignore Escape. Form builders show errors only at the top and mark required fields with an asterisk alone.
Shop extensions: variants, cart and checkout
In shop extensions, variants appear as unnamed tiles, "Add to cart" updates silently, and checkout errors are not tied to their field. Payment providers embed card fields and express buttons as iframes, which need a title and a sane focus order. A cookie-consent extension sits in front of all of it.
Where to look first
| Criterion | Why on Joomla | Automation |
|---|---|---|
| 2.4.6 Headings and Labels (AA) | Headings chosen for size in articles | Manual only |
| 1.3.1 Info and Relationships (A) | Pasted tables, overrides without labels | Partly automated |
| 1.1.1 Non-text Content (A) | Intro and full-text images, gallery extensions | Partly automated |
| 2.4.4 Link Purpose (In Context) (A) | "Read more" in blog layouts, "here" links | Partly automated |
| 3.1.2 Language of Parts (AA) | Unmarked foreign-language passages | Partly automated |
| 2.1.1 Keyboard (A) | Mega menus, sliders, variant tiles | Partly automated |
| 2.4.7 Focus Visible (AA) | Template CSS with outline: none | Partly automated |
| 4.1.2 Name, Role, Value (A) | Menu toggles, icon buttons | Partly automated |
| 3.3.1 Error Identification (A) | Form builders, shop checkout | Manual only |
| 1.4.3 Contrast (Minimum) (AA) | Template colour schemes | Automated |
"Automated" means a rule can decide the criterion on its own; "partly automated" means a rule finds some failures and a person has to judge the rest. The full list is in WCAG 2.2 AA, criterion by criterion.
A sensible order of work
- Measure your template against Cassiopeia. Scan a staging copy once with Cassiopeia as the site template. Whatever disappears came from your template or its overrides.
- List your overrides. Compare each override in your template's
htmlfolder with the current layout, and delete the ones you no longer need. - Switch on jooa11y for editors. Enable the plugin in the backend, show editors what its highlights mean, and add the language list to the editor so they can mark foreign-language passages. Do not leave it visible on the live site.
- Inventory your extensions. List every module, plugin and component with front-end output. The directory will not tell you which are accessible, so ask vendors for test evidence and decide: fix, replace or document.
- Walk the key journeys with a keyboard. Menu, search, contact or membership form, and on a shop: category → variant → cart → checkout → payment in test mode.
- Re-test after every update. Updates change markup and your overrides do not follow; a scheduled crawl catches regressions.
What Reviseberg checks on Joomla – and what you still test yourself
Reviseberg crawls your site, including category, article and product pages, and runs every axe-core rule on every page at a desktop width of 1280 pixels, then repeats the rules that change with the layout – contrast and target size among them – at 360 pixels. Results are mapped to WCAG 2.2 A/AA and EN 301 549. Findings are grouped into issues by rule and ranked by the points you gain by fixing them, so a defect in one template override shows up as one issue on 400 pages rather than 400 separate entries. Where jooa11y looks at one article while it is written, the crawl looks at every published page, template included.
The keyboard agent opens the pages of a journey you name – the home page, a category, a form, the cart – and presses Tab, Shift+Tab and Escape through each, recording every step. It reports unreachable elements, lost or invisible focus, missing skip links and keyboard traps. It does not fill in forms or place an order, so error states, the checkout behind a full basket and the payment iframe are yours to walk by hand. The free report covers up to 100 pages and runs the keyboard agent on one page you choose.
You still test some things yourself: whether alt text describes the image, whether headings and error messages make sense, and how the site behaves with a screen reader and zoom. Screen-reader, zoom and voice-control agents are not built yet; for those criteria the platform gives you guided manual tests, and a criterion nobody has tested is reported as untested, never as passed. There is no Joomla extension from us, PDF documents are not checked, nothing is applied to your site automatically, and we never inject an overlay script.
Written to be useful, not as legal advice. As of 27 September 2026.