How Accsible Helps You Meet Turkey's 2025 Web Accessibility Circular

Turkey's Presidential Circular No. 2025/10, published in June 2025, mandates WCAG 2.2 compliance for public institutions, private businesses, banks, hospitals, and e-commerce platforms — with fines for non-compliance. Here's how Accsible's overlay widget SDK gives Turkish website owners a practical, fast path to meeting the new requirements.

On June 21, 2025, Turkey's Official Gazette (No. 32933) published Presidential Circular No. 2025/10 — a landmark legal document that makes digital accessibility a binding obligation for a sweeping range of Turkish institutions and private-sector organisations. Public bodies have just one year to comply; e-commerce service providers and most private-sector companies have two. With an estimated 8.5 million people living with disabilities in Turkey, and millions more older users who benefit from accessible design, the stakes are high — both for inclusion and for legal standing. <h2>What Is Turkey's Presidential Circular No. 2025/10?</h2> Turkey's Presidential Circular No. 2025/10 is titled "Web Siteleri ve Mobil Uygulamaların Erişilebilirliği" (Accessibility of Websites and Mobile Applications). Signed by President Erdoğan and entered into force on publication, it introduces a formal legal framework anchored in Law No. 5378 on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. The Circular also draws on Law No. 6563 on the Regulation of Electronic Commerce to extend mandatory accessibility obligations specifically to e-commerce platforms. The Circular mandates compliance with two key benchmarks: the Web Accessibility Checklist – Level A, developed by the Ministry of Family and Social Services, and WCAG 2.2 guidelines published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). WCAG 2.2 is the current internationally recognised standard for digital accessibility, covering visual, auditory, motor, and cognitive impairments across desktop and mobile environments. To enforce and oversee compliance, the Ministry of Family and Social Services has established a dedicated Monitoring Commission and an Advisory Commission. The Monitoring Commission publishes an annual monitoring plan and conducts reviews of covered websites and applications. Organisations found to be accessible after the monitoring process are awarded an Erişilebilirlik Logosu (Accessibility Logo), valid for two years — a publicly visible signal of compliance. Those that fail to meet the required standards will be named publicly, creating clear reputational consequences beyond any administrative penalties. Administrative fines already exist within this framework. Under Law No. 5378's transitional provisions, metropolitan municipalities, other municipalities, and public institutions that fail to meet their accessibility obligations can face fines ranging from 5,000 TL to 25,000 TL per identified non-compliance, with a cap of 500,000 TL per year. As monitoring intensifies and enforcement mechanisms mature, organisations left behind face both financial and reputational exposure. <h2>Who Is Covered — and When?</h2> The scope of Circular 2025/10 is deliberately broad. The one-year deadline (expiring around June 2026) applies to public institutions and affiliated organisations, universities, municipalities and their subsidiaries, public economic enterprises, banks, private hospitals, private educational institutions licensed by the Ministry of National Education, passenger transport operators (road, rail, sea, and air), Group A travel agencies holding a Ministry of Culture and Tourism licence, and electronic communications operators with more than 200,000 subscribers. The two-year deadline (expiring around June 2027) applies to e-commerce service providers operating under Law No. 6563 — meaning virtually every business running an online store or marketplace in Turkey. In practice, this is one of the widest-reaching digital compliance mandates Turkey has ever introduced. A private bank, a hospital's patient portal, a state university's student information system, and a mid-sized fashion e-commerce site all fall within scope — each with slightly different deadlines, but all converging on the same technical standard: WCAG 2.2 Level A, at minimum. <blockquote>The Circular establishes that institutions and organisations not meeting their accessibility obligations within the prescribed period will have that information shared publicly — making non-compliance a reputational risk, not merely a legal one.</blockquote> <h2>Understanding WCAG 2.2 Level A: The Technical Floor</h2> Turkey's Circular mandates compliance with the Ministry's Accessibility Checklist at Level A, which is grounded in WCAG 2.2 Level A criteria. While Level A represents the minimum — addressing the most fundamental barriers — it already covers a substantial range of technical requirements that many Turkish websites currently fail to meet. WCAG 2.2 is structured around four foundational principles, often abbreviated as POUR. Content must be Perceivable — meaning users can receive information through at least one sense, such as text alternatives for images, captions for video, and sufficient colour contrast. It must be Operable — all functionality must be accessible via keyboard, not just a mouse, with no content that traps focus or triggers seizures. It must be Understandable — pages should behave predictably, form errors should be explained clearly, and language should be programmatically declared. And it must be Robust — content must remain interpretable as assistive technologies evolve, requiring proper semantic HTML and ARIA usage. WCAG 2.2 also introduced nine new success criteria compared to the previous 2.1 version. Key additions relevant to Turkish sites include Focus Not Obscured (2.4.11), which ensures that focused elements are not hidden behind sticky headers or cookie banners during keyboard navigation; Target Size Minimum (2.5.8), which specifies a minimum clickable area of 24×24 CSS pixels for interactive elements; and Accessible Authentication (3.3.8), which prohibits requiring purely cognitive puzzle-solving for login flows without an accessible alternative. <ul> <li>1.1.1 Non-text Content: Every image, icon, and chart must have a meaningful text alternative readable by screen readers.</li> <li>1.4.3 Contrast (Minimum): Text must achieve at least a 4.5:1 contrast ratio against its background (3:1 for large text).</li> <li>2.1.1 Keyboard: All functionality must be operable without requiring a mouse or pointer device.</li> <li>2.4.11 Focus Not Obscured: When an element receives keyboard focus, it must not be entirely hidden by overlapping content.</li> <li>3.1.1 Language of Page: The default human language of the page must be programmatically declared in the HTML.</li> <li>4.1.2 Name, Role, Value: All user interface components must expose their name, role, and state to assistive technologies via proper semantic markup or ARIA.</li> </ul> Research consistently shows that most websites fail at the basics. According to WebAIM data, the overwhelming majority of web pages contain detectable WCAG failures, with missing alt text, insufficient colour contrast, and empty form labels being the most common culprits. The Turkish context is no different — a significant share of in-scope organisations will need meaningful remediation before their deadlines arrive. <h2>Where Accsible Fits Into Your Compliance Strategy</h2> Accsible is a web accessibility overlay widget SDK designed to close the gap between your existing website and WCAG 2.2 compliance — quickly, without requiring a full rebuild of your codebase. It works by injecting a thin, configurable layer of accessibility enhancements at runtime, addressing the most common and impactful WCAG failures that your underlying code may contain. It is worth being direct about what an overlay SDK does and does not do. Accsible is not a substitute for building accessible HTML from the ground up — no overlay is. What it does is provide a pragmatic, measurable bridge for organisations that need to demonstrate meaningful progress toward WCAG 2.2 compliance within Turkey's legal deadlines, while longer-term development work continues. For many organisations under Circular 2025/10, especially those facing the one-year public-sector deadline, Accsible represents the fastest route to substantive compliance coverage. Accsible's SDK integrates via a single script tag or npm package. Once installed, it activates both a user-facing accessibility panel and a set of automated background remediations. The user-facing panel gives visitors control over their own experience — adjusting font size, letter spacing, line height, contrast mode, cursor size, and more. These adjustments are persistent across sessions using local storage, so returning users do not have to reconfigure their preferences on every visit. <blockquote>"Compliance is not a one-time checkbox — it is an ongoing process." Accsible is built to reflect this, providing continuous monitoring and remediation rather than a static snapshot of conformance.</blockquote> <h2>Key Accsible Features That Directly Map to Circular 2025/10 Requirements</h2> Rather than speaking in vague terms about accessibility features, it is worth mapping Accsible's specific capabilities to the WCAG 2.2 criteria that Turkey's Circular invokes. Screen Reader Optimisation: Accsible injects ARIA attributes — labels, roles, live regions, and landmark roles — across your page, helping assistive technologies like JAWS, NVDA, and VoiceOver interpret your content correctly. This directly supports WCAG success criteria 4.1.2 (Name, Role, Value) and 1.3.1 (Info and Relationships). For sites that rely on visual layout rather than semantic HTML to convey structure, this remediation can be transformative for screen reader users. Keyboard Navigation Enhancement: Accsible ensures all interactive elements are reachable and operable by keyboard alone, addressing WCAG 2.1.1 (Keyboard) and 2.1.2 (No Keyboard Trap). It manages focus order logic and provides a visible focus indicator on all focusable elements, satisfying WCAG 2.4.7 (Focus Visible) and 2.4.11 (Focus Not Obscured). Users who navigate entirely by keyboard — including those with motor disabilities — depend on these behaviours to interact with any part of your interface. Contrast and Visual Adjustments: The widget surfaces user controls for switching to high-contrast mode, dark mode, or a desaturated colour palette — directly assisting users with low vision or colour blindness. It also enables text resizing well beyond the browser default, which supports WCAG 1.4.4 (Resize Text) without breaking page layout. These adjustments matter for a population that includes an estimated 25 million people in Turkey over 40 who experience presbyopia, plus approximately 8% of men with colour vision deficiency. Alt Text Assistance: For images missing alt attributes — one of the most prevalent WCAG failures globally — Accsible's SDK can apply contextual alt text generation, helping satisfy WCAG 1.1.1 (Non-text Content) across dynamically loaded or CMS-managed content where manual auditing is impractical. Accessibility Statement Generation: Turkey's Circular and WCAG both expect organisations to be transparent about their compliance status. Accsible helps generate and maintain an accessibility statement for your site, documenting known limitations, your chosen standards, and contact mechanisms for users to report barriers — aligning with best-practice governance expectations under the Circular's monitoring framework. Dyslexia-Friendly Typography: The widget provides a dyslexia-friendly font option and controls for letter spacing, word spacing, and line height. While these are primarily usability enhancements, they support WCAG 1.4.12 (Text Spacing) and benefit users with cognitive or reading disabilities. <h2>Implementation: From Installation to Compliance Evidence</h2> One of the reasons Accsible is relevant to Turkish organisations working against tight regulatory deadlines is the speed of implementation. Adding Accsible to an existing website does not require a new design system, a framework migration, or a lengthy sprint cycle. For most web environments — whether built on a custom CMS, WordPress, a React single-page application, or a traditional server-rendered stack — deployment involves adding a script tag to the document head and configuring your organisation's settings via the Accsible dashboard. <pre><code> <script src='https://cdn.accsible.com/sdk/v1/accsible.min.js' data-accsible-key='YOUR_SITE_KEY' defer ></script></code></pre> Once the script is live, Accsible performs an initial scan of your page structure and begins injecting remediations. The dashboard provides a real-time compliance report, broken down by WCAG success criterion, so your compliance team can see exactly which criteria are being addressed and which require additional manual development work. This audit trail is valuable not just internally — it is the kind of documentation that demonstrates good-faith effort to regulators and, if necessary, in disputes. Accsible also supports integration via npm for JavaScript-heavy applications, making it straightforward to include accessibility remediations as part of your standard build pipeline rather than as an afterthought. For development teams already using CI/CD workflows, this means accessibility checking can be part of every deployment rather than a periodic manual review. For organisations subject to the one-year deadline under Circular 2025/10 — public institutions, banks, universities, and hospitals — the timeline is genuinely tight. Beginning Accsible implementation now, alongside a parallel programme of manual accessibility auditing and remediation, is the most defensible strategy. The overlay handles the widest common failure types at scale; your development team handles the structural issues — missing semantic landmarks, broken form associations, custom widget ARIA patterns — that require code-level intervention. <h2>The Business Case Beyond Compliance</h2> It would be a mistake to view Circular 2025/10 purely as a compliance burden. The underlying user base it is designed to serve represents real commercial opportunity. Turkey has approximately 8.5 million citizens with registered disabilities — and that figure does not capture the full population that benefits from accessible design: older users navigating complex interfaces on smaller screens, people recovering from temporary injuries, users in low-bandwidth environments relying on simplified layouts, and users who happen to prefer keyboard-driven navigation. Accessible websites tend to perform better in search engines. Semantic HTML, descriptive alt text, logical heading structures, and clearly labelled links are all signals that both assistive technologies and web crawlers use to understand page content. Organisations that invest in WCAG 2.2 compliance as part of their Circular 2025/10 response will often find ancillary improvements in organic search visibility and page performance metrics. There is also the question of trust. The Ministry's Accessibility Logo — awarded to sites that complete the monitoring process and are found to be compliant — is a publicly displayed mark of inclusivity. For banks, hospitals, universities, and e-commerce platforms operating in a competitive Turkish market, being among the first in their sector to display the Accessibility Logo is a meaningful differentiator. It signals to potential customers, patients, students, and partners that the organisation takes its public responsibilities seriously. Internationally, Turkey's move mirrors a global regulatory direction of travel. The European Union's European Accessibility Act came into force in June 2025, requiring WCAG-aligned accessibility across a wide range of private-sector digital services. Turkish companies with EU customers or EU partnerships will need to satisfy both frameworks simultaneously. Accsible's WCAG 2.2 grounding means a single implementation can contribute to compliance across both regimes. <h2>Honest Limitations and How to Address Them</h2> Responsible guidance requires acknowledging what an overlay SDK cannot do alone. Automated tools — including Accsible — reliably detect and remediate a significant share of WCAG violations, but research suggests that automated tools catch somewhere between 30% and 57% of all accessibility issues, depending on the study and the site. The remainder require human judgement: testing with real screen reader users, validating keyboard navigation flows on complex interactive widgets, assessing whether alternative text is genuinely meaningful rather than technically present, and reviewing multimedia content for captioning quality. Complex custom components — date pickers, multi-step form wizards, drag-and-drop interfaces, rich text editors — require developer-level ARIA implementation that no overlay can retrospectively inject reliably. If your site has significant amounts of custom interactive UI, your development team will need to address those components directly, using proper semantic patterns and ARIA design patterns from the W3C's ARIA Authoring Practices Guide. The right model is Accsible as the foundation and accelerator — handling the high-frequency, high-impact failures that exist across most pages — combined with periodic manual audits, user testing with disabled users, and a documented remediation roadmap for complex components. This combined approach is both more effective than either method alone and more credible to the monitoring commissions established under Circular 2025/10. <h2>Key Takeaways</h2> <ul> <li>Circular 2025/10 is in force now. Published on June 21, 2025, Turkey's Presidential Circular mandates WCAG 2.2 Level A compliance for public institutions (one-year deadline) and e-commerce and most private-sector organisations (two-year deadline) — with public disclosure of non-compliant organisations as a consequence.</li> <li>The scope is wider than most organisations realise. Banks, private hospitals, universities, travel agencies with Group A licences, passenger transport operators, telecom providers with 200,000+ subscribers, and all e-commerce platforms are all within scope — not just government ministries.</li> <li>Accsible provides fast, measurable remediation. A single script tag deployment activates screen reader optimisation, keyboard navigation, contrast controls, ARIA injection, and alt text assistance — addressing the most common WCAG failures across your entire site without a codebase rebuild.</li> <li>Overlays and manual remediation work best together. Accsible accelerates compliance coverage significantly, but complex custom components and multimedia content still require developer-level attention and periodic manual audits to achieve full conformance.</li> <li>Compliance is also a commercial opportunity. The Ministry's Accessibility Logo, improved SEO from semantic markup, and access to Turkey's 8.5 million citizens with disabilities make accessibility investment a business advantage — not just a regulatory checkbox.</li> </ul>

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