Digital Trust Index 2026 The State of Digital Accessibility in Europe

1. Summary 91% of European websites fail accessibility requirements, leaving millions at a disadvantage

• 326,250 European homepages from 18 countries were tested for accessibility issues, around 60,000 more than the 2025 study. For Belgium, 9,577 homepages were assessed.

• The state of accessibility in Europe remains poor:

  • We found accessibility issues on 91.45% of tested pages.

  • That's an improvement of 1.52% compared to 2025, and 2.36% compared to 2024 — progress, but far from sufficient.

• All tested countries improved compared to last year, but none reach an acceptable level. Norway, Finland, and Sweden continue to lead, while Romania and Hungary rank lowest. Belgium holds 8th place.

• Category differences remain limited. The Public Sector continues to outperform all other categories by a significant margin. Retail ranks last, as it did in 2025.

• The most common issues are unchanged for the third consecutive year: low colour contrast, hard-to-distinguish links, missing image descriptions, poor or missing labels for links and buttons, and incorrect language settings. All five occurred slightly less frequently than in 2025.

2. Impact Digital trust is about everyone participating in our digital society

Technology is reaching into every part of our society. From making a doctor's appointment and ordering food, to using e-gyms, banking, or meeting new people and engaging with culture and entertainment. Digital solutions are increasingly essential. They offer efficiency and improvements for both companies and users. But not all users benefit equally.

Not everyone is able to quickly adopt new applications and keep track of a multitude of digital services. Is an application easy to use and understand? Does it add value? And most importantly: is it designed so everyone can use it, regardless of ability or background?

Over 100 million Europeans ^[1], one in four adults, live with a disability. Challenges related to mobility, vision, hearing, cognition, or other aspects of daily life are common, whether permanent or temporary.

If we want people to fully trust a digital society, we need to make sure that our digital products and services are accessible and trustworthy. Since 28 June 2025, the European Accessibility Act requires companies and organisations that provide essential digital services and products to meet accessibility standards. The deadline has passed, and as this report shows, most of Europe still has significant ground to cover.

3. Results The needle is moving, but barely

We tested 326,250 European website homepages using an automated tool that checks them against a subset of accessibility requirements from the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). 91.45% of all tested websites fail at least one of our tests. That's an improvement of 1.52% compared to 2025, but progress remains slow.

One important caveat: the 2026 dataset is approximately 23% larger than the 2025 dataset, with only around half of the URLs overlapping. Year-over-year comparisons should therefore be interpreted with care.

European country rankings: failure rates and Year-over-Year progress

When ranking countries by the percentage of websites that fail at least one test, the Nordic countries continue to perform better than the rest of Europe. No country, however, reaches an acceptable level, and for the first time since the Digital Trust Index launched, no country saw its score worsen compared to the previous year.

Some notable shifts compared to 2025:

• Italy and Denmark show the largest improvements, gaining 5.36 and 3.76 percentage points respectively, each moving up several ranking positions.

• Norway remains at the top, with a failure rate of 84.41%, virtually unchanged from 2025.

• Belgium holds 8th place with a failure rate of 91.14%, down from 92.49% in 2025. Given the differences in dataset composition, this is best described as a stagnation rather than a meaningful improvement.

• Romania remains at the bottom, with a failure rate of 95.76%.

The following table ranks the eighteen tested countries on percentage of websites that fail at least one test, from lowest failure rate (Norway with 84.41%) to highest failure rate (Romania with 95.76%).

The next table ranks the eighteen tested countries on change in failure rate between 2025 and 2026. All countries improved. Italy ranks first with a decrease of 5.36 percentage points, Norway ranks last with a decrease of 0.04 percentage points.

The following chart shows how each country's ranking changed between 2025 and 2026.

The following chart shows how many homepages failed multiple of our 61 tests. Each test can have many failures, or violations, against it. For example: a design with low contrast and hard to read colour combinations will most likely have many violations against the 'colour contrast' test.

Industry analysis: accessibility variance across 15 market sectors

In addition to country-level differences, the Digital Trust Index also explores possible variations across content categories.

We assigned following categories:

• Business Services: legal, consulting, HR

• Education and Science

• Energy and utilities: electricity, water, waste, climate

• Financial Services: insurance, banking, credit, accounting, leasing, capital markets

• Healthcare: sports, fitness, care, pharma, life sciences, family, wellness

• Manufacturing: production, automotive, chemicals, metal, machines

• Media and Entertainment: news, music, hobbies, interests

• Mobility & Logistics: public transport, logistics, ports, airplanes, supply chain, postal services, freight

• Non-profit: NGO's

• Public Sector: law, government, politics, defense, public safety, justice

• Real estate: development, construction, technics

• Retail: consumption products, food, drinks, home, shopping, e-commerce, style, fashion, luxury goods

• Technology: computing, software, hardware, social media, telco

• Tourism: travel, hotel, restaurant, events, festivals

• Uncategorized

There is little variation between categories, and the picture is largely unchanged from 2025. The Public Sector continues to outperform all other categories by a wide margin, scoring around 10% better than average. Financial Services ranks second. At the other end of the spectrum, Retail scores the worst, performing around 3% below average — consistent with previous years.

In Belgium, websites in the Financial Services sector show the most notable improvement compared to 2025, performing around 6% better than last year — by far the strongest gain of any Belgian category.

The following table ranks the fifteen categories from lowest to highest failure rate for each tested country + Europe. It includes the amount of tested pages for each category, and compares its failure rate to the average across all categories in the selected region.

4. Common issues: analysis of the 5 most recurring WCAG violations The spotlight on common accessibility hurdles

The five most common accessibility issues are unchanged for the third consecutive year: low colour contrast, hard-to-distinguish links, missing text descriptions for images, poor or missing labels for links and buttons, and incorrect language settings. All five occurred slightly less frequently than in 2025, which is encouraging, but the overall picture remains concerning. These problems pose real obstacles to a wide range of users, with or without disabilities. Most of them are relatively easy to fix for anyone with knowledge of accessibility, and all of them can be prevented by building products and services with digital inclusion in mind.

5. Methodology About the research

The Digital Trust Index 2026 is an annual research initiative conducted by the digital advisory firm Craftzing to measure the state of accessibility of digital platforms. For more details on how the data was collected and analysed, see the full methodology.

6. The path forward You shouldn't just consider accessibility; you should start with it

One in four European adults have some form of disability. For many, participating in the digital society is challenging. Most organizations are unaware of this and are missing out on potential revenue and impact. Yet improvements made to enhance accessibility often benefit a much broader audience, think of closed captions in noisy environments or larger tap targets on mobile. This is known as the curb cut effect: design choices originally intended for a specific group end up helping many. Developing digital services with accessibility in mind from the start creates better products for everyone.

Today, accessibility is often an afterthought, something considered at the end of a digital project. That's not the right approach. It will require significant rework and budget to fix. You shouldn't just consider accessibility; you should start with it.

The European Accessibility Act has been in force since 28 June 2025. Organisations that still have ground to cover should treat this not as a compliance checkbox, but as an opportunity to improve user experience and expand their reach. Those that build an environment that stimulates inclusion benefit from higher digital trust and avoid legal risks. Including accessibility from the start of your processes minimises effort and maximises outcome.

7. Frequently asked questions What you need to know about the EEA

The European Accessibility Act is not written in plain language and is open to interpretation in some areas. Legislation differs between member states because countries can add extra measures when transposing the directive into their national legislation. Here's our concise answer (and therefore not legal advice) to frequently asked questions for the Belgian consumer market.

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