From June 28, 2025, the European Accessibility Act (EAA) will mandate that essential services and products from European companies and organizations meet minimum accessibility criteria to ensure inclusivity for all individuals, regardless of disabilities. Eurostat figures indicate that one in four adults in Europe have a disability. Therefore, Craftzing decided to test the home pages of European websites to determine their compliance with the upcoming EAA standards. On average, 94% of the over 260,000 screened home pages from 18 European countries failed the test.

"In an increasingly digital society, inaccessible websites exclude a significant part of the population. These websites pose challenges for people with visual impairments, making it difficult for them to read text. Individuals who are colorblind struggle to accurately interpret visual data, such as graphs. Those with hand disabilities face difficulties navigating websites, and people with cognitive impairments find complex website structures hard to understand." 

People with visual disabilities are the biggest victims

Websites across all European countries frequently fail to meet two critical criteria for making their content legible for people with visual impairments. The most prevalent issue is incorrect color contrast between text and background, affecting 71% of the websites tested. This makes it challenging for colorblind individuals to interpret the content. Additionally, many websites lack descriptions for links (63% of websites), images (33%), and buttons (18%). These descriptions are essential for visually impaired users who rely on speech technology to navigate websites and understand content.

“Businesses often only begin to focus on digital accessibility once their projects are launched. A common excuse is that addressing all limitations is too time-consuming, energy-intensive, and costly. However, the good news is that the most common problems can be resolved relatively easily. Furthermore, if organizations consider accessibility at the start of a digital project, rather than at the end, it saves a lot of time and effort, expanding the website’s reach. Since 25% of people have some sort of disability, businesses could potentially access 25% more customers and generate additional revenue.”

Hungary at the bottom, Norway is the ‘least bad’

In the comparison of 18 European countries, Hungary (96.3%), Romania (96.1%), and the Czech Republic (95.8%) had the worst scores, with the highest number of inaccessible websites for people with disabilities. Denmark, France, and Belgium occupied the middle ground with scores around 94%, ranking 9th, 8th, and 7th, respectively. Sweden, Finland, and Norway were at the top, with the best-performing websites. However, we noted that even the best scores were not satisfactory. In Norway, the best-performing country, 87.7% of websites failed the accessibility tests.

“We cannot refer to the ‘best performing’ countries, only the ‘least bad’. In reality, none of the European countries have an acceptable level of accessibility. Organizations in European countries are far from ready for the European Accessibility Act, which comes into force next year. At Craftzing, we advocate for stringent enforcement and fines for companies that fail to provide accessibility. This is necessary to encourage businesses to build a digital society in which everyone can participate.”.

See all results of the research on www.digitaltrustindex.eu.

About the Digital Trust Index

The Digital Trust Index is a research initiative conducted by Craftzing to measure the accessibility of digital platforms. Each quarter, the index focuses on one aspect of digital trust. This edition targets accessibility.

For this test, Craftzing used an automated system to evaluate a representative sample of 260,079 European domain names from the Tranco list of top websites. Using testing and scraping tools, Craftzing developed a research application to assess hundreds of thousands of EU website home pages against a part of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) version 2.1, levels A and AA, utilizing Deque’s axe API.

A total of 18 European countries were analyzed. Craftzing excluded countries with fewer than 4,000 websites in their testing sample to maintain comparability. As a result, some European countries were omitted from the sample.

By Roeland Tegenbos

I'm CEO and founder of Craftzing. As a digital strategist I love to work with clients on a strong vision for their future and on a strategy that empowers them to take the lead. I'm a big fan of foresighting: thoughtfully anticipating what the next best move might be.