Brief History Of Presidential Circular 10/2025

On June 21, 2025, a presidential circular titled Accessibility of Websites and Mobile Applications was published in Turkey. The circular required private institutions across different sectors to make their digital channels accessible within one year. Accessibility was to be rendered sustainable through the monitoring of various commissions that were to be established. Additionally, accessible digital channels would be awarded an accessibility logo to increase visibility. These developments made us all very excited. On the other hand, the one-page circular contained very little information regarding the commissions.

In February 2026, a directive outlining how the commissions would operate was added somewhere on the Ministry’s website (if I searched for it now, I wouldn’t be able to find it again). Institutions that had been waiting 8 months for a directive were left without detailed guidance in this document.

By June 2026, one year had passed since the publication of the circular. The Ministry’s checklist, which covers WCAG Level A criteria, was updated to include detailed information.

It is now August, and we still do not know how the audits will be conducted or how we can apply to the Ministry to obtain the accessibility logo. Official channels only yield generic responses, so we wait.

Conclusion: Institutions that care about accessibility prioritized the issue and carried out their work from the moment the circular was released. However, they are now asking, "We did our homework, now what?" As accessibility experts, we cannot answer them. We fear that legal regulations are losing their gravity.

Reading the news from Peru brought this process to mind. When legal regulations are not issued with the right framework and guidance, the implementation timeline suffers. This disrupted timeline, in turn, causes laws to lose their seriousness. What is written on paper fails to be applied in practice, and at the end of the day, everyone knows that this is how it will turn out.