Using the draft yourself

How it works

1. In the scan report, open the “Statement” tab – or follow the button of the bar “Your path to the statement” until it reads “Go to the draft”.
2. Under “Your draft”, choose “Copy text” or “Download as Markdown”. The page shows only the beginning of the text – “Show the whole draft” unfolds the rest –, but copying and downloading always take the whole text.
3. Put the text into your system. Most content management systems accept Markdown directly or can convert it to HTML.

Which document is generated follows from the details at the top of the same page under “Details for your statement”: Which accessibility statement do I need?. The end of the page, under “Other documents from this scan”, says which one is currently shown; you can also choose another one there.

When the draft is finished

As long as the section is called “Preview of the draft”, the two buttons are not there. In their place the page says what is still missing and where you settle it. The draft is finished once three things are done:

• the scan is finished and supports a claim,
• the manual checks that block publication are answered: Answering the manual checks,
• the details for the statement are given – who declares and, where it is asked, the applicability check.

The bar “Your path to the statement” shows this status on every page of the scan: Reading the scan report. A verified domain is not part of it; it is only needed for publishing through the service.

A scan without an account shows the draft only as a preview. To take it along, move the scan into your account and give the details there: The free scan without an account.

What you need to add

Even the finished draft is not a finished document. The service only asks for contact details, the responsible body and the other mandatory details when you publish through it; if you use the text yourself, you add them yourself: Filling in the statement’s mandatory details.

What is missing appears in the text in square brackets; below the two buttons a sentence points this out as long as the text contains such passages. Fill in each of them before you use the text.

Public bodies in Germany first choose whether they belong to the federal level or to a state. As long as the choice is missing, the draft stays a preview that follows federal law and says so at its top: From scan to published statement.

What you are then responsible for

Next to the heading of the draft the page says what date it is from and how many pages it rests on. That is the state you take along: the text you put in place follows no later scan, and after copying or downloading the page says so once more. The comparison below, “How does the text get onto your website – and what happens afterwards?”, shows both ways line by line.

When you publish through the service, it takes over part of the obligations. When you use the draft yourself, they are yours:

The statement text itself is in German, whatever the interface language: Which accessibility statement do I need?.

For US procurement

For websites procured under US law, the “Statement” tab also offers the Accessibility Conformance Report in VPAT format under “Other documents from this scan”, with “Download report as Markdown”. It is in English because it is submitted in English, and it is a draft too: criteria the scan does not fully cover are listed as “Not Evaluated” – unless you assessed them yourself through the manual checks. Then they are listed as “Supports” with the remark that they were self-assessed by the declaring party: The conformance status – and when you may deviate.