Israeli Standard 5568

Israeli Standard 5568 (IS 5568) is Israel's national standard for web content accessibility. It adopts the W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 at Level AA as its technical baseline, and it is the standard that Israeli accessibility law points to when it requires a website or web service to be accessible.

In other words, IS 5568 is the bridge between an international set of technical guidelines and a binding legal obligation inside Israel: the criteria come from WCAG, and the duty to meet them comes from Israeli regulation.

What it is

IS 5568 is Israel's web accessibility standard, based on WCAG 2.0 Level AA. On its own, a standard is just a document describing how an accessible site should behave. What makes IS 5568 matter is that it has been given legal force under the Equal Rights for Persons with Disabilities (Service Accessibility) Regulations. Those regulations make the technical requirements of the standard a legal duty rather than a recommendation.

Because so much Israeli content is written in Hebrew, correct right-to-left (RTL) support and a logical document direction are practical necessities alongside the WCAG requirements. Getting reading order, alignment, and bidirectional text right is part of delivering the standard in practice, even though it sits on top of the core WCAG criteria.

Who must comply

The obligation flows from the Equal Rights for Persons with Disabilities (Service Accessibility) Regulations, so it binds the parties those regulations cover. In practice that means:

• Israeli public bodies — government and public-sector organisations whose websites and digital services must be accessible.
• Many businesses that provide services to the Israeli public — private organisations are also brought into scope where they offer services to the public, so the duty reaches well beyond government alone.

The standard is national in jurisdiction: it governs accessibility of web content and services offered to the public in Israel.

Relationship to WCAG

IS 5568 does not invent its own set of technical success criteria. Instead it adopts WCAG 2.0 at conformance Level AA as its technical core. That means the perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust principles — and the individual Level A and AA success criteria beneath them — are the substance of what IS 5568 requires.

The consequence is reassuring for teams who already build to WCAG: if your content conforms to WCAG 2.0 Level AA, you have met the technical heart of IS 5568. The Israeli layer adds the legal mandate and the local practicalities — most notably solid RTL and Hebrew support — rather than a different rulebook of criteria.

Key points

• IS 5568 is Israel's web accessibility standard, built on WCAG 2.0 Level AA.
• It is given legal force by the Equal Rights for Persons with Disabilities (Service Accessibility) Regulations.
• It binds Israeli public bodies and many businesses that serve the Israeli public.
• Conforming to WCAG 2.0 Level AA satisfies the standard's technical core.
• Because content is frequently in Hebrew, correct right-to-left (RTL) support and logical document direction are practical necessities alongside the WCAG requirements.

Related lessons

The technical work behind IS 5568 is WCAG work. These Learn pages cover the same criteria you need to meet the standard:

• Browse the Learn lessons for hands-on, criterion-by-criterion guidance.
• Accessible forms — labels, error handling, grouping, and autocomplete, mapped to the WCAG criteria IS 5568 adopts.