What actually happens when someone reports a barrier – step by step through the procedure.
Stage 1: The report
Anyone can report a barrier via your (mandatory) feedback mechanism – for example an official gazette that a screen reader cannot read aloud. You must respond and either remove the barrier or explain why not. A paper trail starts at this point.
Stage 2: The conciliation body (section 16 BGG)
If there is no reply or the reply is unsatisfactory, the person can turn free of charge to the conciliation body established under section 16 of Germany's Disability Equality Act (Behindertengleichstellungsgesetz, BGG) at the office of the Federal Government Commissioner for Persons with Disabilities (for state and municipal authorities, the respective state bodies). The procedure is low-threshold and free of charge for complainants – and ends with deadlines and recorded commitments from your administration. Case numbers have been rising for years.
Stage 3: Representative action
Recognised disability associations can take legal action under section 15 BGG – even without being individually affected. At this point at the latest, the PDF problem becomes a case for the legal department and the local press.
In parallel: the monitoring body
Independently of complaints, the monitoring bodies of the federal government and the federal states carry out regular sample checks – simplified (automated, many pages) and in-depth (manual, including PDF samples). The results go to your supervisory authority and feed into the national report to the European Commission.
The financial side
If you only remediate under pressure, you pay twice: external PDF remediation is usually billed per page, plus internal effort in rush mode. An orderly workflow – new documents accessible from the start, existing documents fixed by priority, everything documented – is orders of magnitude cheaper. And precisely the documentation that the conciliation body and the monitoring body want to see is produced automatically by DokAudit as a test report.