Helping Banks Get Accessibility-Ready: AI-Powered B2 Language Compliance Tool

How we built a scalable solution for CEFR B2 enforcement across Europe’s retail banks?

‍In 2025, the European Accessibility Act will become enforceable—marking a major shift in how digital services, including banking websites, must be designed, written, and delivered. The legislation mandates that all public-facing digital content meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA accessibility standards, including language that is understandable to individuals with CEFR B2-level proficiency.

At Sailpeak Research Center, we saw this not as a technical constraint, but as a strategic opportunity:
How could we help banks across Europe comply with this language regulation at scale, across languages, CMS systems, and thousands of web pages—without overwhelming editorial teams?That’s where our CEFR B2 Accessibility Compliance Checker was born.

The Challenge: Legal Mandates Meet Multilingual Complexity
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‍Our client network includes seven leading Belgian retail banks. Together, these institutions serve millions of customers, operate in Dutch, French, and English, and maintain complex digital infrastructures with thousands of URLs.


Key challenges emerged immediately:
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‍Linguistic inconsistency: Product and legal pages were dense, technical, and often exceeded B2 language levels.
‍No one-size-fits-all tech stack: Banks used diverse CMS platforms and had varied levels of content exposure (e.g., some had public APIs, others used JavaScript-heavy rendering).
‍Volume and variability: A scalable solution had to process dynamic content, maintain accuracy, and adapt to new inputs across markets.
‍Tight timeline: With the EAA enforcement set for June 28, 2025, manual audits were no longer viable.

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The Solution: A Sector-Wide AI Evaluator for CEFR B2 Compliance

‍As Sailpeak Research Center's AI Lab, we developed an application using Gen AI to evaluate B2 language compliance, taking into account speed, accuracy, and editorial usability. This tool combines automatic content extraction, language scoring powered by Gemini AI, and structured compliance reporting for editorial follow-up.

‍Key Components:
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A Tool Designed for Scale and Simplicity
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‍At the heart of this initiative is a compliance tool built to transform regulatory pressure into practical action. Designed to operate across institutions, languages, and content types, it delivers both high-level insights and granular outputs that editorial, legal, and UX teams can act on immediately.
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Here’s what the tool offers:
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‍Smart Compliance Benchmarking
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‍We began by auditing a wide range of banking websites to identify common non-compliance patterns and define key success metrics, such as a 70% compliance threshold. This allowed us to focus on high-impact pages—like product and legal content—that are most vulnerable to falling short of CEFR B2 standards.
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‍Automated Page Categorization
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‍The system uses intelligent logic to classify each URL into categories such as product pages, FAQs, legal disclosures, and contact pages. This ensures that content is evaluated within the right editorial and regulatory context.
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‍AI-Powered Language Scoring
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‍Each page is analyzed using a GenAI engine that evaluates vocabulary complexity, grammatical structure, clarity, and coherence. The result? A compliance score backed by clear rationales—delivered in both human-readable reports and structured formats ready for audit trails or CMS updates
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‍Three-Phase Execution Plan
Phase 1: Belgian banks—over 1,000 URLs per institution were evaluated
‍Phase 2: Expanded to French, Dutch, and German markets
‍Phase 3: Planned launch of AI-generated B2-level content rewrites as a premium feature
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‍Results: Measurable Compliance, Scalable Deployment

The initial results from our Belgian banking cohort revealed critical insights:

Primary Risk Area: Clarity—pages scoring under 7.0 were most likely to fall short of B2 thresholds
Scalability Proven: The system handled multi-language content at high volumes, with repeatable outputs per institution
Editorial teams received actionable feedback and a structured foundation for iterative updates. More importantly, these results confirmed that language-level compliance can be systematized and scaled, rather than relying solely on manual copywriting or legal review.

Why This Matters: Accessibility as Brand Equity

‍Beyond meeting legal deadlines, the tool advances clearer digital communication, better user experience, and inclusive branding. In a competitive market where most banking copy still leans toward technical and opaque, B2-level clarity stands out.
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From a marketing perspective, the benefits are strategic:
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*Improved onboarding for digitally vulnerable users
*Greater trust through understandable product explanations
*Future-proofed platforms against changing accessibility laws
*Faster editorial iteration using AI-powered compliance diagnostics
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