EuroNorms scans the homepage of European municipality websites for accessibility compliance using automated testing tools.
axe-core, the open-source accessibility testing engine maintained by Deque Systems. Axe-core is the most widely used automated accessibility testing library and powers the accessibility checks in Chrome DevTools, Lighthouse, and many other tools.
WCAG 2.1 Level AA, which is the standard referenced by EU Directive 2016/2102 (Web Accessibility Directive) and harmonized European standard EN 301 549.
Only the homepage of each municipality website is scanned. The full site is not crawled. This means the results are a sample, not a comprehensive audit.
Automated testing detects approximately 30–50% of WCAG success criteria. Criteria that require human judgement — such as whether alt text is meaningful, whether content is logically ordered, or whether interactions are understandable — cannot be tested automatically.
This means:
The scores reported here are a floor, not a ceiling. The true level of non-compliance is likely higher than what the data shows.
Municipality names, administrative codes, and populations are sourced from Wikidata, Eurostat LAU, and national statistical sources. Website URLs are collected from Wikidata, official municipal registries, and cross-referenced against DNS records.
Municipalities without a working website, or whose website returned HTTP errors during scanning, are excluded from the results.
Scans are run periodically. The scan date is displayed on each country page. The dataset will be updated as new scans are completed.
If you believe a municipality's URL or score is incorrect, please contact us. We will verify and correct the data.
The municipality compliance dataset is published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license. You are free to use, share, and adapt the data for any purpose, provided you give appropriate credit to EuroNorms.