Stats as of 2026-04-29 06:11 UTC — last scan: 2026-04-28

5 scan batches run

3,766 of 3,863 available domains scanned (97.5% coverage) 2,803 of 3,766 scanned domains were reachable (74.4%) 1,079 of 2,803 reachable domains have an accessibility statement (38.5%) 928 domains have the statement link in the footer (86.0% of domains with a statement)

📥 Machine-readable results are available as the accessibility-data.json artifact (machine-readable JSON).

Each country entry in the JSON file includes page-level evidence for pages with and without accessibility statements, plus a per-domain summary you can share to validate the published counts.

Hover or focus any non-zero count in the country table to preview the matching pages. If there are 20 or fewer URLs, the preview shows all of them; otherwise it shows a short sample. Full machine-readable data is available as the accessibility-data.json artifact (machine-readable JSON).

Accessibility Statement Scan by Country

Country Domains Available Reachable Has Statement In Footer Statement % Scan Period
Usa Edu Master 3,760 3,763 2,797 1,071 921 38.3% Apr 2026
Usa Edu Top100 101 100 89 57 55 64.0% Apr 2026
Total 3,861 3,863 2,886 1,128 976 39.1% —

Statement % is the percentage of reachable domains that contain at least one link to an accessibility statement.

Overview

The accessibility statement scanner checks whether each institution page links to an accessibility statement.

As a best-practice baseline, public-facing institutions should:

  1. Publish an accessibility statement describing the accessibility of their website or mobile app.
  2. Include a clearly labelled link to that statement on the page, ideally in the footer.

The scanner detects these links using multilingual term matching.

Scans run automatically every 4 hours via GitHub Actions so coverage grows progressively without overloading institutional servers.

What Is Checked

For each scanned page the scanner:

  1. Fetches the page HTML.
  2. Searches first inside <footer> elements for links whose text or href matches known accessibility-statement terminology.
  3. If not found in the footer, searches the entire page.
  4. Records whether a matching link was found, where it was found (footer or page body), and what text triggered the match.

Multilingual Term Matching

The glossary covers the following languages:

Region Languages
EU official languages Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Irish, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish
Allied nations Icelandic, Norwegian

Example recognised terms include “accessibility statement” (EN), “déclaration d’accessibilité” (FR), “Erklärung zur Barrierefreiheit” (DE), and equivalents in all supported languages.

Tier Classification

Each scanned page is assigned one of three outcomes:

Outcome Meaning
unreachable Page could not be fetched (network error, timeout, 4xx/5xx)
no_statement Page is reachable but no accessibility statement link was found
has_statement Page contains at least one link to an accessibility statement

Pages where the statement link was found inside a <footer> element are additionally flagged with found_in_footer = true, since placing the link in the footer is considered best practice.

Viewing Results

Scan Progress Report

The Scan Progress Report includes a per-seed accessibility statement breakdown showing:

  • Total pages scanned and reachable count
  • Number of pages with a statement link
  • Number of pages where the link was found in the footer
  • Date range showing when each seed was last scanned

GitHub Actions Artifacts

Each workflow run uploads a scan artifact containing:

  • data/metadata.db — the full SQLite results database
  • accessibility-scan-output.txt — the raw scan log
  • data/toon-seeds/**_accessibility.toon — annotated TOON files

To download artifacts:

  1. Go to GitHub Actions → Scan Accessibility Statements
  2. Click on the relevant workflow run
  3. Scroll to the Artifacts section at the bottom of the run summary page
  4. Download accessibility-scan-<run_number> to inspect the database or TOON files

Running a Scan Manually

  1. Go to Actions → Scan Accessibility Statements
  2. Click Run workflow
  3. Optionally enter a seed code (e.g. USA_EDU_MASTER) or leave blank to scan all seed files
  4. Optionally adjust the rate limit (default: 1.0 req/sec)

Via the command line

# Scan a single seed
python3 -m src.cli.scan_accessibility --country USA_EDU_MASTER --rate-limit 1.0

# Scan all seed files (with a 110-minute runtime cap)
python3 -m src.cli.scan_accessibility --all --max-runtime 110 --rate-limit 1.0

Output Format

Annotated TOON file (*_accessibility.toon)

Each page entry gains an accessibility field:

{
  "url": "https://example.gov/",
  "is_root_page": true,
  "accessibility": {
    "is_reachable": true,
    "has_statement": true,
    "found_in_footer": true,
    "statement_links": ["https://example.gov/accessibility"],
    "matched_terms": ["accessibility statement"]
  }
}

Database table (url_accessibility_results)

Column Type Description
url TEXT Page URL
country_code TEXT Legacy field name for seed identifier (e.g. USA_EDU_MASTER)
scan_id TEXT Unique scan run identifier
is_reachable INTEGER 1 = reachable, 0 = not reachable
has_statement INTEGER 1 = accessibility statement link found
found_in_footer INTEGER 1 = link was found inside a <footer> element
statement_links TEXT JSON list of resolved statement URLs
matched_terms TEXT JSON list of matched glossary terms
error_message TEXT Error message if fetch failed
scanned_at TEXT ISO-8601 timestamp of scan

Coverage Scope

Scans currently target United States higher-education institutions in the seed set.

Architecture

flowchart TD
    A["scan-accessibility.yml\n(GitHub Actions — every 4 hours)"]
    A --> B["scan_accessibility.py (CLI)"]
    B --> C["AccessibilityScannerJob.scan_country()"]
    C --> D["AccessibilityScanner.scan_urls_batch()"]
    D --> E["For each URL"]
    E --> F["httpx.get() → HTML content"]
    F --> G["BeautifulSoup → find footer links, then full-page links\nMatch against multilingual glossary terms"]
    G --> H["Classify: has_statement / found_in_footer"]
    H --> I["Save to url_accessibility_results table"]
    I --> J["Write *_accessibility.toon output file"]