Market Surveillance under the BFSG: What Has Really Happened in Recent Months

An honest look back, more than a year later, shows that a lot has happened behind the scenes. The picture is mixed, which is exactly why it pays to look closely.

Since the Deadline: How Market Surveillance Actually Got Started

• ✓ September 2025: The responsible authority, the joint market surveillance body of the German federal states (MLBF), is formally established by an interstate treaty.
• ✓ January 2026: The MLBF presents its market surveillance strategies for products and services (status: 8 January 2026). This is the origin of the frequently repeated claim that market surveillance has been running "since January 2026". What this documents is the strategy, not the start of full operations.
• ✓ June 2026: The MLBF presents its inspection concept publicly and launches its own website. According to an official statement, almost 700 reports had been received and were being processed by then.
• ✓ Staffing: The authority is building up its team, with around 70 positions planned.

In June 2026, the MLBF named completing its organisational and technical foundations as its current focus. At the same time, it was already accepting and processing reports. Enforcement is therefore ramping up. So far, however, hardly any individual fines imposed by the authority have been documented.

The Two-Track Approach: How the Authority Checks Today

The MLBF's inspection concept explains how official oversight works in practice. The authority follows a two-track approach:

• ✓ Active random checks: The authority independently selects digital services and checks them for conformity.
• ✓ Handling complaints: This is where the authority places its emphasis. Reports from consumers and recognised associations explicitly take priority.

Who is in focus? The MLBF does not pick targets at random. Priority goes to services with a wide reach and high importance for independent living, and to providers with a history of shortcomings.

Official penalties under Section 37 BFSG can reach €100,000. This upper tier applies to offering services, which includes online shops. The BFSG and the MLBF's strategy provide for a step-by-step approach: the authority first asks the company to fix the defects within a reasonable deadline. If that does not happen, it can prohibit the service from being offered. Independently of this, violations can be fined.

The Second Channel: Warning Letters under Competition Law and Their Limits

While the official route proceeds step by step and leaves a fair chance to make improvements, there is a second channel that operates independently: the warning letter (Abmahnung) under German unfair competition law (UWG). There is no official grace period here. Competitors or specialised associations send warning letters directly. Two waves show that this is happening:

• ✓ Wave 1 (from August 2025): The Cologne law firm CLAIM Rechtsanwalts GmbH sent the first letters over BFSG violations on behalf of Christopher Liermann (operator of die-website-experten.de). It offered a settlement of €595: anyone who paid and made their website compliant within three months would not have to sign a cease-and-desist declaration or bear legal fees of €1,032.44. The firm later described its letter as a notice with a settlement offer rather than a formal warning letter.
• ✓ Wave 2 (from February 2026): A more systematic wave came from the law firm MK (Michael Krause, Berlin). The letters came with a technical accessibility audit report and a specific payment demand of €2,706.18.

Important context: Whether BFSG violations can be pursued under competition law at all has not yet been settled by the courts. Many specialist lawyers consider the warning letters in circulation to be legally challengeable. A warning letter should be taken seriously, but it is not automatically justified. If you receive one, have it reviewed by a professional before paying or signing anything. Read more in our article Received a BFSG warning letter: what to do now.

The practical lesson is the same either way: making your website or online shop accessible removes the basis for both channels, the official and the private one.

France as a Signpost: Why "Somewhat" Accessible Is Not Enough

A court decision from France shows how strictly accessibility can be interpreted. On 4 June 2026, the Tribunal judiciaire de Caen, in summary proceedings, ordered the retail group Carrefour to make far-reaching changes.

• ✓ The ruling: Carrefour must make its online shop and app fully accessible within six months, or face a daily penalty payment. The deadline therefore expires in early December 2026.
• ✓ The court's reasoning: Carrefour argued that its services were already 71 percent accessible. The court rejected this: accessibility is an obligation of result. A website is not "somewhat" accessible, it is either accessible or not. All applicable criteria (in France, the RGAA standard) must be met in full.

Because French law and the German BFSG are based on the same EU directive, the European Accessibility Act, the ruling sends a signal for interpretation in Germany as well. It is not formally binding on German courts. Worth noting: a few weeks earlier, a court in Lille dismissed a similar case against Auchan E-Commerce, and the associations that brought it have appealed. Case law across Europe is still evolving, but the strict line taken in Caen sends a clear message. How enforcement is developing in other EU countries is covered in our article One year of the European Accessibility Act.

The Legal and Technical Pillars: EAA, BFSG and WCAG

To understand what is expected of websites and online shops, it helps to look at the foundations:

• ✓ EAA (European Accessibility Act): The EU directive that creates a common accessibility standard across the European Union.
• ✓ BFSG (Barrierefreiheitsstärkungsgesetz): Germany's national implementation of the EAA. It requires providers of digital products and services to ensure accessibility systematically. Find out exactly who is covered in Who is affected by the law.
• ✓ WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines): The internationally recognised technical benchmark published by the W3C. The guidelines define measurable criteria at three levels: A, AA and AAA.

The link between the law and WCAG is the European standard EN 301 549. The relevant level is AA. The current technical reference is version V3.2.1, which refers to WCAG 2.1. No version has yet been cited in the Official Journal of the EU as a standard for the European Accessibility Act. The new version V4.1.1, based on WCAG 2.2, was published in September 2026 and is intended to take on this role, but it will only serve as the reference once it has been cited in the Official Journal. According to the W3C, meeting WCAG 2.2 AA today also means meeting WCAG 2.1 AA, so you are already prepared for the next version of the standard.

In concrete terms: the contrast ratio has to be right, form fields need clear labels, and the entire website must be usable with a keyboard alone, without a mouse (keyboard accessibility).

The legal framework itself is also still moving. In March 2026, as part of infringement proceedings, the European Commission again called on Germany to transpose the EAA directive in full. The Commission still sees gaps in the German implementation but has not published which ones. The BFSG may therefore be tightened.

SiteCockpit: Keeping Accessibility in View for the Long Term

Digital accessibility is not a one-off project but an ongoing process. Every day, new products are added, texts are updated and plugins are installed. Any of these changes can introduce new barriers without anyone noticing.

This is where SiteCockpit comes in. The platform offers a central, modular solution that helps you find, fix and continuously monitor barriers without an expensive relaunch:

• ✓ easyMonitoring continuously monitors your website in the background, detects common issues such as poor contrast, missing form labels or invisible keyboard focus, and delivers prioritised to-dos.
• ✓ easyVision is a customisable widget that lets visitors adapt the website to their needs in real time, for example contrast, line spacing or a dyslexia-friendly font. It complements fixing barriers but does not replace it.
• ✓ easyStatement creates a compliant, always up-to-date accessibility statement in just a few minutes, based on your actual test results.
• ✓ easyAlt saves time by generating alt texts for images automatically.

A central dashboard keeps your conformity scores in view.

What Makes Sense Now

The period since the deadline paints a nuanced picture. Official fines have hardly been documented so far, and the authority is still building up. At the same time, hundreds of reports have already been received, warning letters are being sent, and the Carrefour ruling shows how strictly courts can interpret accessibility. The law applies and the need for action is real, even if there is no reason to rush.

• ✓ Assess where you stand: Check the current state of your website or online shop.
• ✓ Fix the most common issues: Start with contrast, alt texts and keyboard navigation.
• ✓ Keep it in view: Every change to your website can create new barriers, so check regularly.

You do not need an expensive, months-long relaunch for this. A step-by-step approach works best, with continuous monitoring after the first fixes, for example with easyMonitoring.

Cover image: © Ajepbah / Wikimedia Commons, modified, licence: CC BY-SA 3.0 DE