Jurisdictions — Americas
Brazil's accessibility law covers every company website — and almost nobody complies
The question Brazil-market clients are asking
Brazil is the outlier most international agencies miss: its accessibility law reaches every company with a Brazilian presence, with no size threshold — and measured compliance is close to zero. Here is the verified picture.
What is true, verified
- The LBI's Article 63 mandates accessible websites. The Lei Brasileira de Inclusão (Lei 13.146/2015) requires accessibility on websites of companies with headquarters or commercial representation in Brazil — no employee or turnover floor (text on planalto.gov.br).
- There is now a technical standard to measure against. ABNT NBR 17225, published in March 2025, gives Brazil a national, WCAG-based digital accessibility standard — before it, "best practices" was the letter of the law; now an audit has a named benchmark. Government sites follow eMAG.
- Measured compliance is strikingly low. Movimento Web para Todos' assessments (with BigDataCorp) have repeatedly found that under 3% of Brazilian websites pass all accessibility tests. Whatever the exact current figure, the whitespace is enormous.
- Enforcement is prosecutor-driven. The Ministério Público has brought civil actions on digital accessibility, and courts have ordered remediation plans. There is no US- style private lawsuit industry — but the legal duty is broader than the US one, and procurement + reputational pressure are rising with the new standard.
- Language note, honestly: Brazilian buyers search in Portuguese ("acessibilidade digital", "site acessível LBI"), and this guide is in English. It serves agencies working the Brazilian market in English; the official sources to hand a Brazilian client are the LBI's text (planalto.gov.br) and ABNT NBR 17225.
How to check a client site yourself
- Accessibility signals: run an automated WCAG checker (axe-core is the open-source standard) on the key templates. ABNT NBR 17225 is WCAG-aligned, so the mechanical failures it flags are the same ones: missing text alternatives, unlabelled fields, contrast.
- Consent posture: load the site cold and watch what fires before consent — Brazil's LGPD is enforced by the ANPD, which publishes its decisions.
- Broken links and SEO basics: same pass, same evidence.
- Document what you saw: capture the page state behind every finding.
The honest shortcut
We built SiteComply to do exactly that pass — accessibility signals, consent posture, broken links, SEO basics — in a single $29 audit where every finding points to the exact page state we observed. White-label friendly, built for agency portfolios, and it never claims more than it verified.