Global web accessibility assessment of national libraries’ websites: A 2025 snapshot

The Web has become a critical asset in the information society. Therefore, it is essential that everyone, including persons with disabilities, has equal access to the Web. But library websites still present barriers to persons with disabilities. Fortunately, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has developed the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) that websites should conform with. Also, some countries have established regulations to force organizations to have their websites accessible by applying WCAG. Despite these efforts, the accessibility of national library (NL) websites remains a global concern. Therefore, it is important to raise awareness among all potential stakeholders of NLs about the prevalence of web accessibility barriers. This study aims to perform a web accessibility evaluation of NLs worldwide and also explores the availability of web accessibility information on NL items from Wikidata. For that, a group of selected websites is evaluated by using Pope Tech web accessibility evaluation platform. Pope Tech can scan, identify, and report issues on a group of websites in asynchronous mode. The findings indicate that most of the NL websites evaluated do not comply with WCAG 2.2, and substantial improvements are needed. Also, we found that information about web accessibility was missing on Wikidata items of NLs. To address this gap, we enriched the NL items in Wikidata by creating accessibility statements and associated qualifiers. Finally, we created a section about web accessibility on the English version of Wikipedia pages of NLs, in the hope that it will raise awareness among stakeholders.