Croatia's First National Web Accessibility Audit — No Public Site Cleared 50% Full Compliance

Croatia's 2019 Accessibility Act transposed EU Directive 2016/2102, giving the independent Office of the Information Commissioner (Ured povjerenika za informiranje) legal responsibility for monitoring, inspecting and reporting on the accessibility of public-sector websites and apps, working alongside the government's central digital-transformation office (SDURDD).
For its first statutory monitoring cycle (websites: 1 January 2020 – 22 December 2021; apps: 23 June – 22 December 2021, carried out September–December 2021), the Commissioner tested every criterion manually rather than relying on automated validators alone: external evaluators from national disability umbrella organisations, including one tester with a motor impairment and one with a vision impairment using the NVDA screen reader, checked 158 public-body homepages against 87 EN 301 549 requirements, plus 18 sites and 8 mobile apps in further in-depth detail against the same 87, and 102, requirements respectively.
Average accessibility varied sharply by sector: highest in health (86%) and social welfare (82%) services, lowest in education/science/sport (69%), with individual-site lows of just 31% in transport and in environment/recreation/culture, against individual highs of 90–100%. Regionally, Adriatic Croatia and Northern Croatia scored highest (81% and 80%), while the City of Zagreb and Pannonian Croatia lagged (71–74%). Critically, the report states that no monitored website satisfied more than 50% of all tracked requirements in full — a gap the Commissioner attributes partly to roughly half of all requirements being inapplicable to any given site, meaning genuine full compliance remains rare even where average scores look strong.
Among mobile apps, the University Computing Centre's MerlinMobile (95%) and the Health Ministry's CovidGO (87%) scored best, while among in-depth-tested bodies the disability employment agency ZOSI (62%), the City of Zagreb (60%) and the Croatian Employment Service (58%) scored lowest — a cautionary sign that even services aimed at, or run alongside, disability and employment support are not yet consistently accessible. The Commissioner has since run follow-up compliance checks (2020 and 2021) and paired the monitoring with training programmes for public-sector staff.

Read the full analysis: https://pristupinfo.hr/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/2021-12-22-1.-IZVJESCE-REPUBLIKE-HRVATSKE-O-DIGITALNOJ-PRISTUPACNOSTI.pdf