This study explored the effect of current regulations on web accessibility compliance for public services in Norway. We evaluated all municipality websites over the course of three years: during the transition period in 2022 (i.e., following the government’s announcement of the new regulations), immediately after the given deadline in 2023, and one year after the regulations came into force in 2024. Evaluations were performed using an automated tool, namely WAVE. In the last evaluation, we also conducted a cognitive walkthrough - via a keyboard and screen reader - on randomly selected websites to better understand changes in their accessibility compliance. The results showed significant differences in detected accessibility issues between the evaluation periods, indicating a positive outlook for continuous improvement and refinement over time. However, most websites still had accessibility violations in the final evaluation round, and hence, the results conclude that the rate of progress is insufficient to achieve web accessibility. This leads us to discuss the importance of raising awareness of and educating everyone in the ecosystem to complement the accessibility regulations, paving the way for a more equal and inclusive digital society.

This journal article examines the impact of new EU regulations on Norwegian municipality websites over a 3 year period. The enhanced regulation led to a decrease in accessibility errors and most WCAG errors decreased as well. For example, low contrast errors showed a significant drop. However, other errors like missing form labels increased over the same period. Accessible templates might be a way to address the large number of remaining errors in the future. #accessibility