The State of Digital Accessibility in Europe

October 12, 2024 | Accessibility

Craftzing creates The Digital Trust Index (DTI) to assess the trustworthiness of European websites. 'The State of Digital Accessibility in Europe' focuses on accessibility and it is the first time that research has been conducted on this large sample of European websites.

The European accessibility act will enforce accessibility requirements more towards the private sector starting from June 28, 2025. The date is getting closer and closer. But are we ready for that? Short answer: No.

Quick summary of the results

Over 260 000 European websitesecond-bests from 18 different countries were tested for accessibility issues. 94% of the sites failed accessibility. So the results are not great.

Finland had the requirements result. At first, this sounds like a great result. But unfortunately, it is quite far from that. Norway, Finland and Sweden were the only three countries that were able to get just below 90%. In Finland, 88.05% of the tested sites failed accessibility tests. So the result is bad. For all the countries.

The most common issues

It didn't really come as a surprise that the most common issues were quite similar to the ones in the Million report. Check out my post about the Million report.

Low contrast text

71% of sites had issues with contrast between text and background.

The contrast between regular text and its background should be at least 4.5:1. And for large text, the contrast should be at least 3:1. I don't understand how hard it can be to achieve this. It shouldn't be this hard.

I do know that some companies love their inaccessible brand colors. But that is not the only reason. And I know that the contrast might not look nearly as bad for many people even if it has slightly less contrast than what is required. But requirements are requirements, just because you or I can see that color, not everyone can.

Missing discernible text for links

63% of sites had link texts that were not understandable. For example, the link might only have an icon and no accessible name at all. These are unfortunately quite common.

And a lot of sites have these vague link texts, like "read more", "click here" or "here". These don't tell much to any user, let alone a screen reader user who is checking all the links on the page at the same time. While having perfect link texts can sometimes be hard, at least aim to get rid of the vague link texts. Instead of just "read more", at least type "read more about the importance of understandable links".

Missing alternative texts for images

33% of sites failed this. I think I've always encountered missing or bad alternative texts in all accessibility audits I've been a part of.

I think some of the problems are due to the requirements that are a bit too generic for many people. Who decides when an image is actually decorative? Even decorative images might bring some value to some users. And users have very differing opinions when it comes to images and their alternative texts. Then there is the alternative text itself. Sometimes it's not easy to know on what level the image should be described.

But here are two quick tips:

pay attention to the alternative texts, and
avoid rubbish alternative texts, such as "asdasdasd", "decorative image" or "image of water".

In other words, make sure that the alternative text sounds reasonable and is translated into each language. One way to check for the alternative text quality is to read the text to someone who hasn't seen the image. Then ask them to describe what they expect to see in the image. Then you can try to compare their description to the actual image and decide if they are close enough to each other or not.

Missing discernible text for buttons

18% of websites contained buttons without text. I don't know what it is with many sites having this issue with both links and buttons.

If you don't know why this matters, a screen reader user is greatly impacted. If the user encounters a button with no discernible text, they will hear only that this is a button. Nothing else. So they will have no idea what the button is supposed to do.

Missing document language

12% of sites did not define the language of the page.

This might not seem like a big problem, and depending on the language skills of the person, it might not be a big problem. But I have experience trying to listen to:

English spoken as Finnish - well, this for a Finnish person might not be so bad since it is quite close to our accent, "rally English". :D
Finnish spoken as English - this actually is horrible and hard to understand.
Swedish spoken as either English or Finnish - these are rather terrible as well, especially since I'm not that strong with Swedish in the first place.

Indistinguishable links in text blocks

11% of websites contain links that can only be identified by colour.

If a link is identified by color alone, there must be sufficient contrast between the link and the background, and also between the link and the surrounding text. Doing all those calculations and comparisons gets tedious, at least in my opinion. I find it much easier to just give links an underline and be done with it.

Besides, an underline is a familiar link indicator for many users. Of course, you can design more unique link styles, but in many cases, I think the extra work is unnecessary. The more common the link styles are, the easier the links are to recognize for a lot of people.

Why do these same errors keep popping up, and at so high rates?

The errors themselves are probably largely due to ignorance. People still lack a lot of knowledge about accessibility in general, let alone the technical requirements.

Mistakes also happen and sometimes go unnoticed. At least I hope people don't go creating issues on purpose.

But one of the reasons why these same deficiencies are repeated year after year is that there is no continuous monitoring of accessibility. There is still a surprising number of people who think that after accessibility has been looked at once, there is no need to return to it. Unfortunately, this is not the case and accessibility should be reviewed and paid attention to throughout the lifecycle of a site.

Of course, when these accessibility issues are found, they should also be addressed. And make sure that the same errors do not return over time.

There are a lot of tools available to designers, developers and content creators to help with accessibility. You can save both time and effort (and money if talking about doing this as a job) if you use even a couple of the tools.

Check out my accessibility site for lists of some tools I've found useful:

Photo by Vlada Karpovich