Turkey's Accessibility Logo: How to Apply and What It Means for Your Business

<p>On June 21, 2025, Turkey's government published Presidential Circular No. 2025/10 in the Official Gazette, fundamentally changing the digital accessibility landscape for thousands of organisations operating in the country. For the first time, websites and mobile applications that meet the required accessibility standards can officially display a government-recognised <strong>Erişilebilirlik Logosu</strong> — the Turkish Accessibility Logo. If your organisation serves users in Turkey and you have not yet started mapping your compliance path, the clock is already ticking.</p> <h2>The Legal Foundation: From Law 5378 to the 2025 Presidential Circular</h2> <p>Turkey's commitment to disability rights did not begin in 2025. The country's foundational disability law, Law No. 5378 on Persons with Disabilities, was enacted in 2005 with the explicit aim of removing barriers and enabling full social participation for people with disabilities. Turkey was also among the first countries to sign the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in 2007, demonstrating an early and formal commitment to the international human rights framework around disability.</p> <p>For years, however, the digital dimension of accessibility remained relatively unaddressed in Turkish law. Physical spaces received the bulk of regulatory attention: buildings, public transport, and open areas were audited, and a physical Accessibility Certificate — issued by provincial governors — could be awarded to compliant venues. The Accessibility Logo was introduced as a visible mark for those certified physical spaces, giving citizens a clear signal that a location was independently accessible. The Ministry of Family and Social Services published the <em>Erişilebilirlik Logosu Kullanım Kılavuzu</em> (Accessibility Logo Usage Guide) to govern how this mark could be displayed on signage, printed materials, and promotional content.</p> <p>The 2025 Presidential Circular extended this logic into the digital realm. Published in Official Gazette No. 32933 and entering into force immediately, Circular 2025/10 mandates that websites and mobile applications across a wide range of public and private sector organisations must comply with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2. The regulation also formally introduced the <strong>Accessibility Logo for digital platforms</strong> — a government-backed mark that certified websites can display for two years following a successful review.</p> <p>The circular simultaneously established a dedicated <em>Web Siteleri ve Mobil Uygulamaların Erişilebilirliği İzleme Komisyonu</em> (Monitoring Commission for Web and Mobile Application Accessibility) under the leadership of the Minister of Family and Social Services. This commission is responsible for carrying out regular monitoring of digital accessibility compliance and publishing annual monitoring plans. The results of completed reviews — and the list of organisations that have been found non-compliant — are made public, adding a reputational dimension on top of the regulatory one.</p> <h2>Who Must Comply — and by When</h2> <p>The scope of the 2025 Circular is broad and deliberately inclusive of both public institutions and private sector players. Understanding exactly where your organisation falls is the first practical step. The regulation draws a clear distinction between two compliance timelines.</p> <p><strong>Within one year of the Circular's publication (by June 2026)</strong>, the following categories must bring their websites and mobile applications into conformity with the WCAG 2.2 Level A Checklist:</p> <ul> <li>Public institutions and government bodies at all levels</li> <li>Universities and higher education institutions</li> <li>Municipalities, municipal enterprises, subsidiaries, and affiliates</li> <li>State economic enterprises (kamu iktisadi teşebbüsleri)</li> <li>Professional bodies with public institution status</li> <li>Banks</li> <li>Private hospitals</li> <li>Private educational institutions licensed by the Ministry of National Education</li> <li>Private organisations providing passenger transport services by road (under Law No. 4925), rail, or air</li> <li>Group A travel agencies holding an operating licence from the Ministry of Culture and Tourism</li> <li>Telecommunications operators with more than 200,000 subscribers</li> </ul> <p><strong>Within two years (by June 2027)</strong>, e-commerce service providers operating under Law No. 6563 on the Regulation of Electronic Commerce must also reach full compliance. This is a significant inclusion: Turkey's e-commerce sector has grown rapidly, and the two-year window, while more generous, is not open-ended.</p> <blockquote> <strong>Important:</strong> These are not aspirational targets — they are legal obligations. The Ministry has stated that details of non-compliant organisations will be shared with the public, meaning reputational exposure is a direct consequence of missing a deadline. </blockquote> <p>It is also worth noting that the Turkey Human Rights and Equality Institution (TİHEK) has already been active in this space. In a 2024 ruling (Decision No. 2024/403), TİHEK found that a bank's internet and mobile banking applications could not be read by screen reader software and ruled that this constituted a violation of the prohibition on disability-based discrimination. Regulatory enforcement is already a reality, not a future concern.</p> <h2>What Is the Accessibility Logo and What Does It Certify?</h2> <p>The Turkish Accessibility Logo is an official mark, adapted from the United Nations accessibility symbol, that signals a digital service's conformity with the country's accessibility standards. For digital platforms, the logo is awarded by the Ministry of Family and Social Services following a completed monitoring review. Once granted, organisations may display it on their websites and mobile applications for a period of <strong>two years</strong>, after which the evaluation process must be repeated to maintain the right to use it.</p> <p>The logo is not self-declared — organisations cannot simply place it on their site because they believe they are compliant. The right to use it flows from a completed official review by the Monitoring Commission. In this respect it functions more like a certification mark than a simple badge. When the two-year validity period expires and a renewed review confirms continued compliance, the logo can be used for another two-year cycle.</p> <p>The Ministry's Logo Usage Guide sets out the rules governing how the mark must be displayed. The logo must be used in its entirety without modification, can appear in both colour and black-and-white versions, and may not be used for personal commercial financial gain or in ways that imply United Nations endorsement of a product or service. On websites and mobile applications, the logo signals to users — including those who rely on assistive technology — that the platform has been independently reviewed and found to meet baseline accessibility requirements.</p> <p>For organisations that already hold the physical Accessibility Certificate for their premises, the digital logo is a natural extension of that commitment: the same mark, now applied to the digital front door of the business.</p> <h2>The Technical Standard: WCAG 2.2 Level A</h2> <p>The technical benchmark specified by the 2025 Circular is <strong>WCAG 2.2, Level A</strong>, cross-referenced against the Ministry's own <em>Web Siteleri ve Mobil Uygulamaların Erişilebilirliği Kontrol Listesi – A Seviyesi</em> (Website and Mobile Application Accessibility Checklist – Level A). This checklist was updated in October 2023 to align with the then-current version of the international guidelines.</p> <p>WCAG 2.2 is built on four core principles — Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, and Robust (POUR). Level A represents the baseline: the absolute minimum requirements without which large groups of users with disabilities will be entirely unable to access content. Practically, this means ensuring things like: all non-text content has a text alternative; all audio and video content has alternatives; all functionality is available from a keyboard; users are given enough time to read and use content; content does not cause seizures or physical reactions; and the page structure is programmatically determinable.</p> <p>If you are already pursuing WCAG 2.1 AA compliance for other markets — for example, to meet the European Accessibility Act, which mandates compliance for EU-facing services — you will likely exceed Turkey's current Level A requirement. However, if your Turkish digital presence has never been audited against WCAG criteria, do not assume Level A is simple. A 2016 study of Turkish government websites found widespread failures to meet WCAG standards, and more recent research confirms that the pattern of neglecting alt text, ARIA labels, and keyboard navigation remains common across many sectors.</p> <blockquote> The WCAG 2.2 standard is the current, internationally recognised guideline for ensuring the accessibility of digital content. Under this standard, the Level A checklist defines basic accessibility criteria, and all covered websites must comply with at least this level. </blockquote> <p>Common Level A failures to audit immediately include: images without descriptive alt attributes; form inputs without programmatically associated labels; videos without captions or audio descriptions; pages that cannot be navigated using only a keyboard; links with non-descriptive text such as "click here"; and colour as the sole means of conveying information. Each of these is a barrier for a specific group of users — blind users, motor-impaired users, Deaf users — and each is directly testable.</p> <h2>How to Prepare: A Practical Compliance Roadmap</h2> <p>Getting to the point where your website qualifies for the Accessibility Logo is a structured process, not a single action. Here is a realistic sequence of steps for organisations working toward compliance.</p> <p><strong>Step 1 — Conduct a baseline audit.</strong> Before remediation can begin, you need to know where you stand. An accessibility audit combines automated scanning (which can catch roughly 30–40% of WCAG failures efficiently) with manual review (which is necessary for context-dependent issues like meaningful alt text, reading order, and logical focus management). Map every finding to the specific WCAG 2.2 success criterion it fails, and prioritise by severity and user impact. For organisations with large content libraries, a sample-based audit of representative page templates is a practical starting point.</p> <p><strong>Step 2 — Remediate by priority.</strong> Fix the issues that prevent any user from completing a core task first — form submission, navigation, checkout, or account access. Then move through lower-severity issues systematically. Where your codebase makes deep remediation complex, a well-implemented accessibility overlay widget can bridge the gap by applying runtime fixes for specific WCAG failures while longer-term development work proceeds. Solutions like Accsible provide an SDK that extends accessibility features without requiring wholesale code refactoring, making it especially practical for time-pressured compliance timelines.</p> <p><strong>Step 3 — Publish an Accessibility Statement.</strong> While not yet explicitly mandated for all sectors under the 2025 Circular in the same way the EU Web Accessibility Directive requires it, an accessibility statement is strong evidence of good faith. It should describe which standards you are targeting, known limitations, and how users can report accessibility problems. This document is frequently the first thing a monitoring commission auditor or a complainant will look for.</p> <p><strong>Step 4 — Test with real users and assistive technologies.</strong> Automated tools and manual reviews by sighted keyboard testers are necessary but not sufficient. Testing with screen readers (NVDA or JAWS on Windows, VoiceOver on iOS and macOS) and with keyboard-only navigation will surface issues that no automated scan will find. Even a small round of user testing with disabled participants provides qualitatively different insight than any tooling approach alone.</p> <p><strong>Step 5 — Integrate accessibility into your development workflow.</strong> Passing the first monitoring review earns the logo for two years — but sustaining it requires that new features and content do not introduce regressions. Building accessibility checks into your CI/CD pipeline, training your content editors on alt text and heading hierarchy, and making accessibility part of your definition of done are all steps that turn a one-time sprint into a sustainable practice.</p> <h2>Business Benefits Beyond Compliance</h2> <p>It is worth stepping back from the regulatory framing for a moment. Turkey's disability statistics are significant. According to the National Disability Database, approximately 13% of Turkey's population — roughly 9 million people — lives with some form of disability. The WHO estimates globally that 16% of the world's population has some form of disability. Add to this the older adult population, temporary impairments, and situational accessibility needs, and the audience that benefits from an accessible website is far larger than those with formal disability status.</p> <p>From a commercial perspective, the Accessibility Logo is a visible trust signal. Citizens who rely on assistive technology have historically had to discover by trial and error whether a given website works for them. The logo changes that dynamic: it provides advance assurance that the site has been independently reviewed. For banks, hospitals, e-commerce platforms, and transport companies — all sectors covered by the circular — that trust signal can influence purchase decisions and service uptake.</p> <p>There is also an SEO dimension. Accessible HTML — semantic heading structure, descriptive alt text, properly labelled form fields — is exactly the structured, machine-readable content that search engines reward. Accessibility improvements and organic search improvements frequently travel together, making the investment in compliance doubly productive.</p> <p>Finally, Turkey's alignment with WCAG 2.2 places it within the international consensus on web accessibility standards. Organisations that build to WCAG 2.2 Level A and work toward Level AA will find themselves largely compatible with the requirements of the European Accessibility Act, the ADA, and other major regulatory frameworks — a meaningful advantage for any organisation operating across multiple markets.</p> <h2>Key Takeaways</h2> <ul> <li><strong>The 2025 Circular is live and binding.</strong> Presidential Circular 2025/10, published on June 21, 2025, creates legal obligations for a wide range of public and private sector organisations in Turkey to make their websites and mobile apps WCAG 2.2 Level A compliant — with deadlines running from June 2026 (most covered entities) to June 2027 (e-commerce providers).</li> <li><strong>The Accessibility Logo is earned, not self-declared.</strong> It is awarded by the Ministry of Family and Social Services following a completed monitoring review, remains valid for two years, and must be renewed. Non-compliant organisations will be publicly named.</li> <li><strong>Start with an audit, not with assumptions.</strong> Many organisations that believe their sites are broadly functional will find significant WCAG Level A failures when they run a proper audit. Prioritise issues that block core user journeys for keyboard and screen reader users first.</li> <li><strong>Overlay SDKs and accessibility tools can accelerate your path to compliance.</strong> For organisations facing the one-year deadline, solutions like Accsible provide runtime accessibility enhancements that complement — not replace — underlying code remediation, helping organisations demonstrate meaningful progress while deeper development work proceeds.</li> <li><strong>Accessibility is a market opportunity, not just a legal box to tick.</strong> With approximately 9 million people with disabilities in Turkey and a much larger group benefiting from accessible design, compliance with the Circular expands your reachable audience, builds user trust through the recognisable logo, and aligns your digital presence with growing international standards.</li> </ul>