Most people testing an Israeli site for accessibility use an international tool. Those tools are excellent, and there is one thing they cannot know: the Israeli standard does not adopt the international one line for line.

SI 5568 carries an annex of national changes. It is short, almost nobody talks about it, and it contains four things worth knowing. One is stricter, two are relaxed, and one removes a requirement outright.

One stricter: headings

Internationally, the criterion requiring a proper heading structure sits at level AAA, the excellence tier most sites do not claim. In Israel it was raised to AA, the binding level.

That means a page with hierarchical content needs headings marked as headings in the code, not text enlarged and bolded in the design. We covered that separately, because it is also the requirement that returns the most in Google and AI terms.

The practical point: an international tool may flag a skipped heading as “best practice” rather than an error, because internationally it is AAA. In Israel that is a failure at the binding level. Anyone relying only on what the tool paints red misses precisely the clause that was raised here.

Two relaxed: video

And here is the part that saves money.

Audio description for recorded video is an additional recording narrating what happens on screen for someone who cannot see it. Internationally it is a level AA requirement. In the Israeli standard it moved down to AAA, meaning it is not required across the board, only where an individual request is received.

Captions for live broadcast took the same route: an international AA requirement, and in Israel only on individual request.

This is not a nuance. Producing audio description for a promo video is a real expense, and plenty of businesses pay it because somebody told them “the standard requires it”. It is worth checking against the actual wording before commissioning.

What is required: captions for recorded video with sound, at the binding level. Note that this is also the best value of the three, since most mobile visitors play video with no sound at all.

And one that simply does not apply

The international standard requires marking, in the code, every passage written in a language other than the page language. On a typical Hebrew site, which sprinkles English terms into every other paragraph, that is endless manual work.

The Israeli standard notes that this requirement apparently does not apply on a Hebrew page, because the character encoding already gives the screen reader that information.

That saves hours on any site mixing Hebrew and English, which is nearly every Israeli business site.

Why this matters beyond the saving

There is a principle here. The Israeli standard was not copied, it was weighed. Somebody sat down and decided that heading structure matters enough to be mandatory, and that audio description on every video is a disproportionate burden for a small business.

Anyone who knows this annex can hold a precise conversation with a supplier: demand what is genuinely required and decline to pay for what is not. Anyone who does not know it leans on whatever an international tool paints red, and gets exactly the inverted picture: lenient where Israel is strict, and strict where Israel is lenient.

What it means when choosing a supplier

This annex is a quiet negotiating tool. A supplier who knows it will tell you what is required and what is not; a supplier who does not will work to an international tool’s defaults.

Two questions worth asking. First: is a skipped heading level an error or a note in your process? In Israel the correct answer is an error. Second: what exactly are you budgeting for my video? If the answer includes audio description as a blanket requirement, it is worth asking for a reference to the wording.

And one last detail in the annex worth knowing, even though it changes nothing in practice: three criteria covering text alternatives for media were raised from level A to level AA. Practically that alters nothing, since meeting AA already includes every level A requirement. What it does do is phrase them more precisely for Israel, allowing a choice between a text alternative and an audio description alongside the captions.

In short

Four clauses, one short annex, and they shift the picture in both directions. Heading structure you must do; audio description you probably need not. Captions for recorded video yes; marking every English term no.

On every site we build we work to this wording rather than the tool’s defaults, which is why a skipped heading fails our check even where the international tool was willing to let it pass.

To be clear: everything here is general information, not legal advice. For a concrete question about a specific business’s obligations, consult someone qualified.

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