Accessibility of municipal websites in Norway after Web Accessibility Directive – parallel analysis by another actor – summary

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I am not the only one concerned about accessibility and it seems that I also had similar timing, methodology and results. I didn’t go all in with the crawling of absolutely everything and I didn’t test the documents as they did. So that’s why I made a short summary to enrich my own analysis.

This post is actually part 5 in series of posts about Accessibility of municipal websites in Norway after Web Accessibility Directive and please check out other parts if you didn’t do it before. You can start with part one – “Accessibility of municipal websites in Norway after Web Accessibility Directive – introduction“.

Luckily I am not the only one concerned about accessibility

Life is sometimes funny and full of coincidences. I’ve just found out about almost exactly the same analysis done by a company called Accessibility Cloud (in Norwegian, opens in new window) that I’ve cooperated a bit in the past. They have done it slightly differently and didn’t analyze the accessibility statements like I did in “Accessibility of municipal websites in Norway after Web Accessibility Directive – statements analysis“, but they did check absolutely all crawlable webpages for 354 municipalities (I don’t know why they didn’t do the 2 remaining) and also analyzed all linked documents with automatic tools. They also analyzed webpages of county municipalities.

Same tool, similar methodology, similar results

We actually used same tool for automatic accessibility testing of webpages, so it’s not a surprise that findings are quite similar, although their analysis found way more potential contrast issues than mine:

  1. Elements must have sufficient contrast (50%)
  2. Links must have discernible text (16%)
  3. id attribute value must be unique (7%)
  4. Frames must have an accessible name (6%)
  5. <li> elements must be contained in a <ul> or <ol> (6%)
  6. Certain ARIA roles must be contained by particular parents (5%)
  7. Images must have alternate text (3%)
  8. IDs of active elements must be unique (3%)
  9. Elements must only use allowed ARIA attributes (2%)
  10. Certain ARIA roles must contain particular children (2%)

Most common errors across all sites (cover 75% of all errors):

  1. Elements must have sufficient contrast (50%)
  2. Links must have discernible text (16%)
  3. <li> elements must be contained in a <ul> or <ol> (6%)
  4. Images must have alternate text (3%)

Some other relevant numbers from their analysis:

They’ve checked 354 municipality websites with 204882 webpages and found 755353 WCAG failures, 103663 of them unique. At the same time they also discovered 156737 documents and automatic accessibility test for documents found 1628277 document errors.

68.64% of websites had accessibility problems on their home page and 100% of websites had accessibility problems on some page. 100% of websites had accessibility problems on their documents.

If we just think about statistics of documents for a second we may conclude that documents are way more problematic than webpages. And I think that is quite a reality.

They also analyzed content management system powering the municipality websites and found out that there are three dominating providers:

  1. ACOS with 45% market share,
  2. CustomPublish with 28% market share,
  3. AIM by Prokom with 16% market share.

EpiServer and WordPress power only 2% of all municipality websites and Joomla! only 1%.

As they crawled absolutely all crawlable pages they found that Bergen had the most pages, 194000 to be precise. And smallest websites with only 126 pages was Modalen.

Accessibility statement analysis differences

They also report that 10% of municipalities still didn’t publish their accessibility statements and that 11% of municipalities published accessibility statements after the deadline of 1st of February 2023.

My accessibility statements analysis returned different numbers – I was unable to find 60 out of 356 required accessibility statements. This means that in the time period when I did the test (Easter 2023) 16.44% of websites still didn’t have a valid accessibility statement. By valid I mean published on centralized domain from the Norwegian authority. I don’t know the methodology they used but I do know that I needed to go through some websites manually and check the presence via their chat-bots or even search fields as the links weren’t published on any of the 50 webpages crawled per municipality.

Overall – I am happy I am not the only one concerned and I am happy that they choose to crawl absolutely all webpages and also check all documents.

I still have some data to share, so please check the blog in the following weeks for more info.

Author: Bogdan Cerovac

I am IAAP certified Web Accessibility Specialist (from 2020) and was Google certified Mobile Web Specialist.

Work as digital agency co-owner web developer and accessibility lead.

Sole entrepreneur behind IDEA-lab Cerovac (Inclusion, Diversity, Equity and Accessibility lab) after work. Check out my Accessibility Services if you want me to help your with digital accessibility.

Also head of the expert council at Institute for Digital Accessibility A11Y.si (in Slovenian).

Living and working in Norway (🇳🇴), originally from Slovenia (🇸🇮), loves exploring the globe (🌐).

Nurturing the web from 1999, this blog from 2019.

More about me and how to contact me: