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Good practice Imported

NTC 5854 & Resolución 1519 — Colombia's Mandatory Web Accessibility Standard

Colombia · Bogotá · See the Colombia profile · See the Bogotá profile

Evidence: Observational / pre–post Top 31% 84/100 · Ask Evidence Copilot about this practice

Colombia's ICONTEC standard NTC 5854, made binding for public entities by MinTIC's Resolution 1519/2020, requires WCAG 2.1 AA by 2022 — but a 2022 academic audit of 93 entities found the legal standard still was not being met.

93
Public entities evaluated (2022)
~400
Web pages evaluated (2022)
NTC 5854 & Resolución 1519 — Colombia's Mandatory Web Accessibility Standard

Details

Maturity
Established
Promoter
Ministerio de Tecnologías de la Información y las Comunicaciones (MinTIC)
Period
2011–present
Keywords
web accessibility, WCAG 2.1, e-government, ICT public policy, ICONTEC standard

Context

NTC 5854 was ratified by ICONTEC in 2011, defining three WCAG-2.0-modelled conformity tiers (A, AA, AAA). MinTIC's Resolución 1519 of 2020 made it binding for national and territorial public entities ("obligated subjects"), setting 1 January 2022 as the deadline to reach WCAG 2.1 level AA.

Objectives

To bind a pre-existing national accessibility standard into public procurement and operating rules with a firm compliance deadline, and to test whether that mandate was actually being met.

Activities

A 2022 peer-reviewed study (Cortés Fandiño & Solano Salinas, Uniminuto, published in Revista Española de Discapacidad) evaluated roughly 400 web pages across 93 Colombian public entities, combining automated and manual validation with staff and citizen interviews.

Results

The study's finding was blunt: sites did not meet the legally required AA level, with root causes identified as low institutional awareness and the near-total absence of people with disabilities from web development and procurement processes.

Conclusions

The 93-entity study is the strongest available compliance evidence but is not an exhaustive national census, and no more recent (2023-2025) follow-up audit was found to confirm improvement; MinTIC has not published a self-reported compliance percentage or a public sanctions tracker.

Implementation
Indicative cost
Medium (€50k–€500k)
Time to results
Long (> 3 years)
Staffing & skills
Ministerio de Tecnologías de la Información y las Comunicaciones (MinTIC), ICONTEC (national standards body maintaining NTC 5854), independent academic researchers (Uniminuto) conducting compliance evaluation

Conditions for success

  • A pre-existing, independently maintained technical standard (NTC 5854, aligned to WCAG) to bind into regulation rather than drafting one from scratch
  • A binding resolution (1519/2020) with a firm compliance deadline (1 January 2022) referencing the standard directly in its technical annex
  • Independent, methodologically transparent compliance evaluation (automated + manual testing + interviews) to check whether the mandate is actually being met
  • Including people with disabilities directly in web development and procurement processes, whose near-total absence the 2022 study identifies as a root cause of non-compliance

Common failure modes

  • The independent 2022 study found public entities were not meeting the legally required AA level, more than a decade after the standard's ratification and past the compliance deadline
  • Low institutional awareness and exclusion of people with disabilities from development and procurement were identified as root causes
  • No more recent follow-up audit or official compliance percentage has been published, leaving current status unverified

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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