Web accessibility in Costa Rica: what the law requires and what an auditor measures

For a private website in Costa Rica, the short answer to “does the law require it?” is that today there is no specific technical requirement. No directive tells you “WCAG 2.1 AA”, and none sets you a deadline. If you came looking for the number you have to meet, there is no number.

That is not the same as saying there is nothing. Law 7600, Costa Rica's disability rights act, and article 9 of the UN Convention approved by Law 8661 establish accessibility duties that reach private entities, and both are law in force. What they lack is the technical detail, not the force. Where there is a concrete requirement with a standard named is the public sector, and from there it reaches the private sector through the contract: whoever sells to the State inherits it.

This article settles the legal part first, which is short, and devotes the rest to the question left over once the law steps aside: not whether you are required to, but what gets measured and how to check your own site.

What it means for a site to be accessible

An accessible site is one that can be used by a person who cannot see, who cannot hear, who cannot use a mouse, or who needs to enlarge the text a great deal. In practice that translates into verifiable criteria: sufficient contrast, everything reachable from the keyboard, images with descriptions, forms with labels, and a heading structure a screen reader can move through.

It is not a layer added at the end. A good part of the requirements are construction decisions: that buttons be buttons, that images have an alternative, that focus be visible. Adding them afterwards usually costs more than having done them right.

What the law says, in short

The two underlying laws

Law 7600, Igualdad de Oportunidades para las Personas con Discapacidad (1996), Costa Rica's disability rights act, sets accessibility obligations for public and private institutions. It is a broad law, written before the web was the main channel for much of anything, and how it applies to a particular website is not spelled out in its text.

The second one is more recent and is cited less than it deserves. With Law 8661 (2008), Costa Rica approved the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Its article 9 deals with accessibility and expressly includes information and communications systems and technologies, the Internet among them, and asks that private entities offering services open to the public take accessibility into account. It is the most direct legal link that exists in Costa Rica today between “accessibility” and “private website”.

The public-sector directive

For the public sector there is a concrete, technical requirement: directive 051-MTSS-MICITT, of June 2019, which orders official websites to meet the accessibility criteria of WCAG 2.1. The equivalent Costa Rican standard is INTE/ISO/IEC 40500:2020 MOD, which is that same version 2.1 of the guidelines adopted as a national standard by INTECO, the national standards body.

Two clarifications that are almost never made and that change the meaning. The first: a directive is an instrument of the Executive Branch, and as such it binds the Executive administration; the Legislative and Judicial branches, the Comptroller General, the Ombudsman's Office, the Supreme Electoral Tribunal and the Civil Registry are urged by the directive, not bound by it. The second: the deadline it gave for reaching compliance was three years from 2019, so it has already passed.

The private sector

It is worth starting with what is concrete, because it usually ends up buried under the rest: if your company sells to the State, the public-sector requirement reaches you through the contract. Being a private company does not exempt you. The tender specification passes it on, and by that point it is no longer a recommendation.

Outside that case, the honest answer is that today there is no specific, enforceable technical requirement for a private Costa Rican website. There is no directive telling you “WCAG 2.1 AA” and no deadline to meet. For a private company, the national technical standard works as a reference and not as a direct obligation.

It is worth understanding exactly what that sentence says, because it invites being read for more than it states. What is missing is the specification, not the duty. Law 7600 and article 9 of the Convention approved by Law 8661 establish accessibility obligations that reach private entities, and both are law in force. What neither of them does is turn into a list of criteria and a date. How far they are held to reach may change over time.

So if what you were looking for was a list of criteria and a date someone is going to hold you to, today there is none. If what you were looking for was whether it is worth doing anyway, that is a different question, and the law is not what answers it best.

Why do it even if no one requires it

With the law settled, the question that actually decides is left: whether it is worth it. Four reasons that do not depend on anyone requiring it.

• It is a real share of your visitors. And not only people with a permanent disability: someone browsing with one hand busy, with the phone in the sun or on a bad connection runs into the same obstacles.
• It overlaps almost entirely with technical quality. Headings in order, HTML that means something, contrast measured, focus visible. It is what makes a page also read well to a search engine or to an answer engine.
• It costs less now. Fixing accessibility on a finished site usually means rebuilding components.
• If you sell to the State, you already have it on you. A tender specification passes the requirement on without warning, and by then someone else sets the deadline.

How to check your own site without hiring anyone

Here is where the useful part starts. Four checks that catch a large share of the frequent problems and that you can run this afternoon:

1. Go through the site with the keyboard alone. Tab to move forward, Enter to activate. If you cannot reach something, or if you cannot see where you are standing, you have a problem — and it is one of the ones that most annoy anyone who does not use a mouse.
2. Zoom to 200%, then try 400%. The 200% is the text resize criterion; the 400% is reflow, and it is the one that uncovers the tables and menus that break. If text is cut off, overlaps, or a horizontal scrollbar appears, there is a problem.
3. Run an automated checker. Tools like axe catch part of the failures in seconds. Only part: automated testing covers a fraction of the criteria.
4. Measure contrast with the formula, not by eye. The eye gets used to things and forgives; the number does not.

A warning about point three: an automated checker returning zero violations does not mean the site is accessible. It means it did not find what it knows how to look for. Alternative text that reads “image1” passes the automated test and is worth nothing; an absurd tab order passes it too. Automated testing rules out the crude failures and leaves untouched what has to be looked at with judgment.

If you have a checker returning zero on your site, the useful question is not what it found: it is which parts of the page it managed to look at. An entrance animation can leave half the page out of the measurement without the tool complaining.

Those four checks find the big things. What they leave untouched is exactly what decides whether a person can use your site or not: whether the tab order follows the logic of the page, whether the alternative texts say anything, whether a form reports its errors in a way a screen reader will announce. No tool sees that, and it has to be looked at with judgment.

If you want that review done, it is work for the studio division. What comes out of it is a list of what is wrong, ordered by what weighs most, with what each item costs beside it, so that you decide what gets fixed now and what can wait. And unlike an audit that ends by handing over a document, we do the fixing as well: the report is the beginning of the work, not the end.

It starts with a thirty-minute meeting in which we go through your site with you and tell you what we found, no cost, no obligation to hire us. If what comes out of it is that your site is fine, we will tell you that too.

Frequently asked questions

Does the law require a private website to be accessible in Costa Rica?

Not with a specific technical requirement. What is missing is the specification, not the duty: Law 7600 and article 9 of the Convention approved by Law 8661 impose obligations that reach private entities, without turning into a list of criteria or a date. For the public sector there is one: directive 051-MTSS-MICITT of 2019 requires WCAG 2.1 of official sites, with the INTE/ISO/IEC 40500:2020 MOD standard as the national reference. And whoever sells to the State inherits that requirement by contract.

What level of WCAG has to be met?

Level AA is the usual regulatory reference. The Costa Rican directive for the public sector points to WCAG 2.1, adopted as a national standard in INTE/ISO/IEC 40500:2020 MOD. For a private site there is no required level, so AA works as the sensible yardstick: it is what a tender specification would ask for if one ever comes your way.

Is running an automated accessibility tool enough?

No. Automated tools detect only a fraction of the WCAG criteria, and a result of zero violations means the tool did not find what it knows how to look for, not that the site is accessible. There is also a less well known trap: if the page reveals its sections with an animation, the checker may skip everything still at zero opacity and return zero having looked at half the page. It is worth turning animations off before measuring, and always completing the check with a keyboard run-through and human review.