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Good practice Imported

Everyone's Public Website Operational Guidelines — Japan's Mandatory Accessibility Testing & Disclosure Regime

Japan · Tokyo · See the Japan profile · See the Tokyo profile

Evidence: Observational / pre–post Top 30% 88/100 · Ask Evidence Copilot about this practice

Since 2016 Japan's MIC has required government bodies to test sites against JIS X 8341-3:2016 and publish results yearly — a transparency rule that keeps accessibility gaps visible even when compliance is only partial.

60 pages
Pages tested in Digital Agency's 2024 disclosure (2024)
40 pages
Web pages tested (2024)
20 documents
PDF documents tested (2024)

Details

Maturity
Established
Promoter
Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (MIC) & Digital Agency, Japan
Period
2016–present
Keywords
digital accessibility, e-government, public sector ICT, disability inclusion, transparency

Context

Japan's Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (MIC) has issued the "Everyone's Public Website Operational Guidelines" since 2016 (most recently revised 2024), directing national ministries, independent administrative agencies and local governments to test their websites against JIS X 8341-3:2016 — Japan's WCAG 2.0-aligned accessibility specification — and publish the results.

Objectives

To institutionalise honest, recurring public self-disclosure of accessibility test results across government, keeping accessibility gaps visible and creating pressure for incremental fixes even without independent audit.

Activities

Agencies sample representative pages and run automated checks (Nu Html Checker, axe-core, Adobe Acrobat Pro for PDFs) plus manual testing with screen readers (NVDA, VoiceOver), then publish a public accessibility statement declaring their conformance level. The Cabinet Office, Statistics Bureau, MEXT and the Digital Agency are among the bodies that publish their own results.

Results

The Digital Agency's own 2024 disclosure, published 1 April 2025, tested 60 pages (40 web pages and 20 PDFs) and reported only "partial compliance" with the lower Level A — short of the Level AA that MIC recommends — with recurring failures in image alt text, video captions and PDF tagging.

Conclusions

The guideline shows both the value and the limits of disclosure-based governance: transparency without independent audit still leaves compliance gaps, but it has kept accessibility visible in Japan's policy process for close to a decade.

Implementation
Indicative cost
Medium (€50k–€500k)
Time to results
Long (> 3 years)
Staffing & skills
MIC guideline authors and Digital Agency accessibility testers, agency-level staff running automated scans and manual screen-reader testing at each reporting body (Cabinet Office, Statistics Bureau, MEXT, Digital Agency, etc.)

Conditions for success

  • A named, defined technical standard (JIS X 8341-3:2016) to test against, revised periodically (last in 2024)
  • A defined, repeatable test methodology combining automated tools (Nu Html Checker, axe-core, Adobe Acrobat Pro) and manual screen-reader testing (NVDA, VoiceOver)
  • A public disclosure requirement so results are visible and comparable across dozens of national bodies year over year

Common failure modes

  • Self-administered testing without independent audit can under-report gaps compared with third-party verification
  • Even the coordinating body's own 2024 disclosure only reached partial Level A rather than the recommended AA, with recurring failures in alt text, captions and PDF tagging

Commonly funded by

National / regional programmes

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Data sources

Where this practice's information was retrieved from, and when.

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