The Latest Legislative Updates on Digital Accessibility in Israel

Unlike other fields, digital accessibility in Israel almost never advances through one big, one-time "new law." It moves forward gradually — a standard update here, a regulatory amendment there — and it’s easy to miss a change that actually does affect your organization. In this article, we’ll go through the layers that make up Israel’s legal framework for digital accessibility, and what has genuinely changed in recent years.

Where it all started: the law and the regulations

The legal basis for digital accessibility in Israel is the Equal Rights for Persons with Disabilities Law, 5758-1998, which establishes the general right to accessibility. But the law itself doesn’t go into technical detail — that’s done by the Equal Rights for Persons with Disabilities Regulations (Service Accessibility Adjustments), 5773-2013, which are the regulations that actually require websites and digital services to be accessible.

The regulations set a timeline: existing sites were required to become accessible by October 25, 2017, while new sites are required to be accessible from the moment they launch. The obligation applies to public bodies, as well as to private businesses in commerce, healthcare, entertainment, education, welfare, sports, and tourism — in other words, to most sites that offer a service to the public in Israel.

Standard 5568: from websites to documents

The regulations point to the Israeli SI 5568 standard, which translates the general legal requirement into precise technical criteria — based on the international WCAG standards. This is exactly where the most significant change in recent years took place: the standard was originally published as a document dealing with websites (what’s known today as "Part 1"), but on May 14, 2020, Part 2 was added, dealing explicitly with digital document accessibility — PDF, Word, and other file types.

The implication: the obligation doesn’t stop at the website’s own pages. A PDF published on a site that can’t be read with a screen reader is just as problematic as an inaccessible web page — and that applies to old documents that have already been sitting on the site for years too. (You can read in depth about the standard’s two parts and the differences between them in our dedicated article on the topic.)

What this means for you today

In practice, there are two important things to know. First, the regulations themselves are relatively stable, but the WCAG standards they’re based on have been updated since 2013 (WCAG 2.1 in 2018, WCAG 2.2 in 2023) with additional criteria — so a site that was "compliant" a few years ago may now lag behind current expectations. Second, enforcement in Israel is active in practice through two tracks — administrative (the Commission for Equal Rights of Persons with Disabilities) and civil (private lawsuits and class actions) — so the exposure isn’t theoretical. (We covered this in more depth in a separate article on legal liability.)

How to stay up to date

A few simple habits help you stay on top of things: following updates from the Standards Institution of Israel (SII) and the Commission for Equal Rights of Persons with Disabilities website, publishing an up-to-date accessibility statement on your site, and checking — periodically, not once — every PDF and document published on your site. That’s exactly what our tool does: automatically mapping every document on your site, with a report that shows precisely where the gaps are.