The Web Accessibility Directive (WAD) brought accessibility requirements to public sector websites and mobile apps.
The site and its contents must meet the technical accessibility requirements. The technical requirements come from the European standard EN 301 549. In the standard, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines are defined as the required compliance.
The accessibility statement is a tool for the user, not for the supervisory authority or accessibility auditors.
The accessibility statement must be easy to find on the service, so it cannot be hidden in the structure. A common place for a link to the accessibility statement is in the site footer.
Every person has the right to give accessibility feedback on a website.
When the website is under legal accessibility requirements, they are also required to provide a way for users to give feedback. This information should be in the accessibility statement so the user can find how they should send their feedback.
The user needs to receive a reply within two weeks of the feedback. If they get no reply or if the reply is not satisfactory, the user can escalate the issue and create a complaint about the site to the supervisory authority.
In Finland, the supervisory authority is Traficom.
Traficom does yearly monitoring of sites under the legal requirements. This monitoring is done in two methods: fully automated or manual expert testing. This is not to be confused with an accessibility audit; they even state that in their reports.
Traficom also handles user complains about sites that don't meet the requirements and don't react into accessibility requests in a satisfactory way.