KWCAG Web Accessibility Mandate & WA Certification

South Korea requires public-sector websites to meet the Korean Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (KWCAG 2.1), a WCAG-aligned technical standard maintained under the Ministry of Science and ICT (MSIT). The legal basis is the Act on Welfare of Persons with Disabilities (2014), which mandates Level AA conformance for all central and local government sites and allows fines of up to 5 million won for non-compliant public bodies.
Compliance can be certified through the WA mark, issued by the state-recognised Korea Web Accessibility Certification and Evaluation Agency after automated and expert manual review; the mark is voluntary for private-sector organisations but functions as the reference certification for the public sector.
A peer-reviewed study in the Journal of Open Innovation: Technology, Market, and Complexity manually assessed 25 Korean public-institution websites in the science and technology sector against KWCAG 2.0 and found compliance rates of 68% for the Perceivable principle, 64.5% for Operable, 59.2% for Understandable and only 28.0% for Robust — evidence that even under a binding legal mandate, technical conformance (especially machine-readability, the Robust principle) lagged well behind the letter of the law. We could not find a more recent, larger-sample public compliance survey in English-language sources, so this practice is scored as evidenced but dated, not as a current success metric.

Read the full analysis: http://www.wa.or.kr/