Base44 and accessibility: what Israeli regulations require of your app, and how to check it

The short version

This is a plain-language summary, not legal advice. If your app serves the public in Israel, check your own situation with a lawyer or an accessibility professional.

• The rule. Israel’s service accessibility regulations require a business that offers a service, or information about it, through websites, documents or apps to make it accessible to level AA of the Israeli standard IS 5568. Its current edition (September 2023) is WCAG 2.0 with a few Israeli changes.
• The statement. You also have to publish an accessibility statement in a prominent place on the site and in the app.
• Exemptions exist. For example, an exempt dealer (עוסק פטור) or a business with average annual turnover up to NIS 100,000.
• Base44’s part. Base44 gives design guidance and prompts for accessibility. It doesn’t claim that the apps it generates meet any standard, so checking and fixing your app is your job.

What Israeli law requires, as of October 2026

The obligations come from the Equal Rights for Persons with Disabilities Law, 1998, and its service accessibility regulations of 2013. The internet rules are in regulations 35 to 35F, which took their current form on 26 October 2017.

What counts as an internet service

The regulations define an internet service as content in any format, including text, documents, images and video, delivered over the internet and shown through websites, documents or applications, that provides a public service or information about one. A Base44 app that sells, books, registers or informs the public is likely to fall under it.

The standard: IS 5568 at level AA

Regulation 35A requires accessibility at level AA under the Israeli internet accessibility standard, IS 5568, which the regulations define “as amended from time to time”. The Standards Institution of Israel publishes it free of charge on its public standards page:

• Part 1 (September 2023) covers websites. It is the W3C’s WCAG 2.0 with national changes: captions and alternatives for prerecorded video move from level A to AA, live captions and audio description move from AA to AAA, section headings move from AAA to AA, and “language of parts” doesn’t apply. The standard explains the video changes by how hard captioning in Hebrew still is.
• Part 2 (September 2023) covers digital documents, such as PDFs.

So the practical target is WCAG 2.0 level AA, adjusted as above.

Apps for phones

Regulation 35C says apps for phones and tablets must meet an Israeli standard for apps if one exists. Until then, the success criteria of IS 5568 apply as far as they’re relevant, on at least two common operating systems. An app is exempt if the identical service runs on an accessible, mobile-ready website and the app links to it. This matters if you publish your Base44 app to the App Store or Google Play.

Documents, forms and content from users

• Documents prepared from 26 October 2017, such as PDFs on your site, must be accessible, and so must online forms used to obtain the service (regulation 35A).
• If your users upload content, you aren’t responsible for making their content accessible, but you must provide accessible tools, such as a field for describing an image (regulation 35B).
• Captions for recorded video are required of public bodies and of businesses with average turnover above NIS 5 million that produce video (regulation 35D).

The accessibility statement

Regulation 35E requires a statement in a prominent place on your website, and in your app if you have one. It must describe the accessibility adjustments you’ve made, give the accessibility coordinator’s contact details if the law requires you to appoint one, and say how people can report a problem or ask for an adjustment.

Exemptions and notice

Under regulation 35F:

• An exempt dealer, or a business whose average annual turnover is NIS 100,000 or less, is exempt from the internet rules.
• A service that only pre-registered users can enter, with at most 500 registered participants at a time, is exempt unless a person with a disability asks for an adjustment.
• If your platform can’t technically support a specific adjustment, a service accessibility certifier can exempt you from it, based on a professional’s opinion, for up to three years at a time. You must then offer an alternative and say so in your statement.

The Commission for Equal Rights of Persons with Disabilities also runs an online request for an exemption on grounds of undue burden.

Regulation 35A adds that a deviation isn’t treated as a breach unless the business was sent a notice and didn’t fix it within a reasonable time, no later than 60 days, and that it must offer an alternative in the meantime.

What’s at stake

The Equal Rights Law makes a breach a civil wrong. For breaches of the service accessibility rules, a court can award up to NIS 50,000 without proof of damage, subject to defenses the law lists.

What Base44 offers, as of October 2026

Base44’s documentation treats accessibility as part of design:

• Design guidance. The accessibility section of Design foundations and layout covers color and contrast, readable typography, keyboard and focus, reduced motion, and labels and alt text, each with a prompt you can paste into the AI chat.
• A checklist. The guide to building a website has a short accessibility checklist: heading levels, alt text, contrast, descriptive links, and keyboard access to every menu, button and form.
• Page language and policy pages. The SEO guide explains how to set the page’s lang attribute in index.html, and suggests a prompt that adds an accessibility statement to the footer alongside the privacy policy and terms.

What the documentation doesn’t do is mention WCAG or IS 5568, or claim any conformance level for the apps Base44 builds. Base44’s accessibility work in its own product, such as the screen reader support added to the agent editor on 29 July 2026, is about Base44’s editor, not your app.

What to check in an AI-built app

These are the places to look first in AI-generated React code. Each row gives the WCAG 2.0 criterion behind it.

The criteria are defined in WCAG 2.0. For the Hebrew layout itself, see our guide to building a right-to-left app on Base44.

How to test

1. Run an automated check on each page, such as the accessibility audit in Lighthouse or Deque’s axe browser extension. It finds the mechanical problems quickly.
2. Use the keyboard only. Tab through every page and flow: sign-up, sign-in, checkout, forms. Can you reach everything, see where you are, and get out of every dialog?
3. Zoom to 200% and check that nothing overlaps or disappears.
4. Listen to it. Use a screen reader in Hebrew, such as NVDA on Windows or VoiceOver on a Mac or iPhone, on your main flows.

Automated tools find only part of the problems: Deque says its axe-core engine finds on average 57% of WCAG issues automatically. The standard itself says applying the guidelines takes a great deal of human judgement, which is why businesses often have an accessibility professional review the app.

On accessibility plugins: the Israel Internet Association warns that most free accessibility add-ons don’t meet all the legal requirements. A toolbar that changes font size doesn’t fix a form without labels.

Writing the accessibility statement

The regulation requires three things: what you’ve made accessible, the accessibility coordinator’s details if you must have one, and a way to report a problem or ask for an adjustment. The Israel Internet Association’s guidance also suggests stating the level you meet, which browsers you tested with, any exemptions you have, and the date of the statement.

You can ask Base44’s AI chat to create the page, as the SEO guide suggests. Read what it writes before you publish. A generated statement that says “the site meets IS 5568 level AA” is a claim you have to be able to back up.

What owning the code changes

Accessibility is the same obligation wherever the app runs, and moving an app doesn’t make it accessible. On Base44 you fix problems through the AI chat or the Code tab. The risk is drift: a later AI edit can remove a label or a focus style, and nothing tells you.

With the code in a repository you control, you can make the checks automatic. Tools such as axe-core and eslint-plugin-jsx-a11y can run on every change and fail the build when a button loses its name. You can also write your accessibility rules into the files that coding agents read before they edit.

Unbase44 moves the app’s own React frontend, with a few small patches listed in docs/MIGRATION.md, into your private GitHub repository, with docs for people and for coding agents (README, AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md). It runs locally with docker compose up, so you can test a change with a screen reader on your own machine before you deploy it. The free analysis shows what’s in your app first: start here. For the other compliance questions, see Base44 and GDPR and who owns a Base44 app.