On two municipal home pages, the machine found no errors

On the websites of Budapest, its 23 districts and the 25 county-rank cities I measured the home page and, where the home page links to it, the accessibility statement. I read the statements by hand. The figures are aggregates, without names.

What I measured, and what I did not

From the automated part I aggregate three things, because a machine decides them reliably: whether images have a description, whether every link and button has a name, and whether the page states its language. I measured contrast and the focus indicator as well, but I do not aggregate them: on other people's sites, hidden drop-down menus and text over photos make the automated figure too imprecise there.

I did not look at subpages, forms, PDFs or mobile apps, nor at what only a person can judge — whether an image description makes sense, for instance. The figures are therefore a lower bound. Each website received one or two page loads, under an identifiable name and with pauses; on one site the provider's firewall limited the second load, so its statement is missing.

The statement

Hungary's Act LXXV of 2018 requires the statement on the website, and the EU model suggests linking it from the home page or from the footer of every page.

• 17 home pages have no link to the statement, not even at the bottom of the page. At least four of them have a button that switches on an accessible view.
• One link leads to a page that does not exist.
• Six statements are downloadable documents; I did not analyse them.
• Of the 22 readable statements, 15 name KIFÜ as the monitoring body. Since January 2025 monitoring has been done by the Digital Hungary Agency.
• Of the 21 dated statements, 11 are from 2021 or 2022. The law asks for regular updates, and the EU model suggests a yearly review.
• Eight statements claim full compliance. On six of those home pages the machine found a clear error: an image without a description, a link without a name, and in one case the pale grey, hard-to-read helper text of a form.
• One statement claims full compliance on the strength of two automated checking tools. Of the fifty WCAG 2.1 AA criteria, a machine can decide only some.

The home pages

Of the 48 home pages measured in the second round, 32 have at least one structural error: 17 have an image without a description, 28 a link or button without a name, and two a missing or wrong language attribute.

For a link without a name, a screen reader says only “link”, or reads out the web address. On one home page, ten institution cards link like this.

The accessible view

At least 14 home pages offer an accessible view, a toolbar or an external overlay. On 11 of them there are structural errors all the same, and in one case it is the very link that switches on the accessible view that has no name. A toolbar enlarges the text or switches to a high-contrast view; it does not fix the page's code.

The two home pages where the machine found nothing

On two home pages the automated measurement found no error at all. On these the statement cannot be reached: one has no link to it, and on the other the link leads to a page that does not exist.

What can be fixed quickly

• a link to the statement in the footer, on every page;
• the name and contact details of the monitoring body in the statement, with the date;
• image descriptions and link names — this is content editing, not development, and it accounts for most of the errors measured.

The national picture

According to the monitoring body's three-yearly report (in Hungarian), there were 1,123 checks between 2022 and 2024; 72% of them found no statement, and of the 73 websites examined in detail, 4 fully complied. My measurement is narrower: the home pages of 49 municipalities, on one day.

What the law asks is covered in a separate piece; how I measure and fix, on the accessible website page.

Questions on this topic

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