AgID × CNR-ISTI MAUVE++ — Checking Italy's Self-Declared Accessibility Against a National Automated Crawl

Public bodies in Italy are required to self-declare the accessibility of their websites and apps each year, but self-declaration alone cannot verify whether services are actually accessible.

Check Italy's self-declared public-sector accessibility against an independent, research-grade automated crawl, and publish the divergence between the two rather than reconciling it away.

AgID (Agenzia per l'Italia Digitale) crawls the Italian public administration at scale using MAUVE++, an automated validation platform developed by CNR-ISTI and extended with AgID, funded as PNRR measure 1.4.2 "Citizen Inclusion". In the September–December 2024 quarter alone the monitoring covered more than 4.7 million web pages, 29,409 sites and 780,152 PDF files, with results published quarterly on AgID's open monitoring portal.

AgID reports that substantially all PDFs analysed present at least one unmet accessibility criterion, with only about 1% correctly structured. For 2023, public bodies self-declared 43% of web services conformant, 56% partially conformant and 1% non-conformant (35%/63%/3% for apps) — a picture AgID's own service head Claudio Celeghin was openly sceptical of, attributing the gap to administrators lacking accessibility expertise. 48,432 declarations had been published since 2020 (46,463 for websites), but only around 43% of institutional sites catalogued in IndicePA had published one at all.

Automated validation detects a subset of WCAG failures and cannot substitute for manual or user testing, so the crawl establishes a floor on the problem, not its full extent; neither instrument alone would support a claim that Italian public services are accessible.