Korea's Web Accessibility Quality Certification — A Digital Inclusion Act Cert Mark Backed by Three Government Bodies

South Korea has operated a legally-recognised Web Accessibility Quality Certification since the early 2010s, most recently recodified under Article 21 of the 2023 Digital Inclusion Act. The Ministry of Science and ICT designates three certification bodies — the Korea Web Accessibility Certification Institute, WebWatch, and the Korean Association for the Blind — to audit public and private websites, apps, software and kiosks against the Korean Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (KWCAG 2.1), which align closely with international WCAG 2.1.
One of the three designated agencies, WebWatch, alone reports 17,586 certified sites (16,775 issued under the current law and 811 issued under the prior legal framework), indicating substantial and sustained voluntary and mandated uptake across Korean public bodies and companies. Separately, the government's own longitudinal benchmark — the Annual Web Accessibility Survey run by the Ministry of Science and ICT (MSIT) — shows the average compliance score rising from 53.7 in 2019 to 60.9 in 2022, but nearly flat across the last three years measured (60.7 in 2020, 60.8 in 2021, 60.9 in 2022).
That near-plateau is the honest caveat: certification volume has kept growing, but the government's own accessibility benchmark shows measured, real-world website accessibility improving only marginally since 2020, with the survey itself noting that 'notable gaps remain, especially among small and mid-sized organizations' — a gap between certification uptake and demonstrated usability gains.

Read the full analysis: http://www.webwatch.or.kr/certification/