17.1% Alt Text Compliance: What South Korea's 2025 Web Accessibility Survey Reveals

Imagine a webpage with five images. Four of them have no alt text.

When a blind user visits this page using a screen reader, those images are announced simply as “image” — or worse, as a raw filename. No meaning. No context.

This isn’t a hypothetical. It’s the reality measured by South Korea’s 2025 Web Information Accessibility Survey, published on March 27, 2026.

What Changed This Year

South Korea’s 2025 survey adopted a new standard. The guidelines were updated from KWCAG 2.1 (24 criteria) to KWCAG 2.2 (32 criteria), with 9 new items added.

KWCAG stands for Korean Web Content Accessibility Guidelines — South Korea’s national standard, closely aligned with the W3C’s WCAG but adapted for local regulatory requirements.

The newly added criteria reflect the realities of modern web interfaces.

Below is the full list of all 32 criteria and their scoring weights under KWCAG 2.2. Items marked NEW were added in this revision.

The scoring weights were also recalculated in full. The total remains 100 points, but since the number of criteria and their individual weights have changed, direct comparisons with pre-2024 figures should be made with this in mind.

The Results: 70.4 Points — Up, But Is It Enough?

South Korea’s Ministry of Science and ICT (MSIT) and the National Information Society Agency (NIA) surveyed 1,000 South Korean websites between July and December 2025. The overall average score was 70.4 points — up 3.7 points from 2024.

On its face, that looks like steady progress. But sit with the number for a moment: a score of 70 out of 100 means nearly 30 points’ worth of content or functionality is still out of reach for someone.

Scores by Industry

Seven of eight industries improved. Accommodation & Food Service jumped 11 points, and Finance & Insurance gained more than 8.

But one industry went the other direction: Education Services was the only sector to decline.

Education: The Only Drop — and an Uncomfortable Question

In South Korea, education sector websites scored 75.2 in 2025 — down from 76.9 in 2024, a drop of 1.7 points.

It’s the only industry among the eight to fall year-over-year. Education websites carry a particular obligation: students with disabilities, older learners, and adults with visual or hearing impairments all rely on these platforms.

The lowest-scoring criteria in this sector were Appropriate Alternative Text (26.0 pts), followed by Focus Navigation and Indication (53.4 pts) and Skip Repeated Content (60.9 pts).

As digital education expands, inaccessible learning environments create higher barriers for the very learners who need the most support. The numbers dropping isn’t just a statistical fluctuation.

The Numbers That Are Hard to Ignore

Looking at the four WCAG-equivalent principles, Robust scored 99.9 — nearly perfect. Perceivable came in last at 60.8.

Here are the criteria with the lowest compliance rates:

1. Alternative Text: 17.1 Points

Dead last out of all 32 criteria — by a wide margin. This is the most fundamental accessibility requirement: providing an alt attribute on images. A score of 17.1 means 4 out of 5 South Korean websites aren’t doing it properly.

Adding alt to a single <img> tag is arguably the easiest accessibility task there is. So why is this number so low? Part of the answer is cultural: the idea that images need descriptions hasn’t fully taken root in development practice yet.

There’s also a non-developer factor. Even when developers build websites carefully, content managers and admins often upload announcements as image files with no alt text at all. You can build a required alt field into the CMS — and they’ll type “.” or “1” just to get past it.

<!-- ❌ Missing alt text -->
<img src="company-intro.jpg">

<!-- ✅ Alt text provided -->
<img src="company-intro.jpg" alt="Headquarters exterior — Gangnam-gu, Seoul, South Korea">

2. Skip Repeated Content: 33.2 Points

Also known as skip navigation — a link that lets keyboard users jump past repeated headers and menus directly to the main content.

For mouse users, that’s one scroll. For someone navigating by keyboard, it means pressing Tab dozens of times before reaching the content. Two out of three South Korean websites don’t offer this.

3. Focus Navigation and Indication: 44.5 Points

When a user presses Tab, focus should move in a logical order and always be visually visible. If the focus indicator disappears or jumps off-screen, keyboard users lose track of where they are entirely.

4. Headings Provided: 55.3 pts / Keyboard Accessibility: 57.1 pts

Without proper headings, screen reader users can’t understand the document’s structure. Without full keyboard support, users who can’t use a mouse are simply locked out of certain features.

Some Things Are Going Well

Nine criteria hit 100 points: Content Separation, Character Key Shortcuts, Adjustable Timing, Limits on Flashing, Pointer Input Cancellation, Motion Actuation, Accessible Authentication, Redundant Entry, and Parsing.

There’s a pattern here. The criteria achieving 100% are mostly either technically easy to implement, or automatically compliant when a certain content type isn’t present — sites that don’t use flashing content can’t fail the flashing criterion.

The low-scoring criteria, on the other hand, require active effort every single time content is created: adding alt text to every image, checking heading structure on every new page. They can’t be automated away. They need human judgment.

What These Numbers Mean

South Korea’s survey is grounded in legal obligation. The Digital Inclusion Act (디지털포용법), Articles 11 and 19, requires web accessibility not as a recommendation but as a legal duty — specifically to ensure that people with disabilities and older adults can access information online.

As of 2025, an estimated 194,455 South Korean businesses operate websites. An alt text compliance rate of 17.1% means the vast majority of those sites are failing to deliver image information to blind users.

The numbers are moving in the right direction each year — that’s genuinely encouraging. But 17.1% is still far too low, and that gap translates directly into real people’s daily experiences.

How Does the US Compare? The ADA Angle

Is this just a South Korea problem? A quick look across the Pacific suggests it isn’t.

The US has the ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act), enacted in 1990 to protect people with disabilities from discrimination in employment, transportation, and public accommodations. Originally focused on physical spaces, court rulings have since established that websites fall under the ADA’s scope.

In March 2024, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) finally codified the requirement: state and local government websites must conform to WCAG 2.1 Level AA. After years of legal ambiguity, it’s now written into federal rule.

So with stronger legal footing, how is the US actually doing?

The WebAIM Million report, published annually by web accessibility research organization WebAIM, automatically tests the homepages of the top one million websites. The 2024 results: 95.9% had detectable WCAG failures. That’s 96 out of every 100 homepages with accessibility errors right from the start.

One of the most common failure types? Missing image alternative text. Different country, different language, different legal system — same basic failure.

The fact that the US has legally binding accessibility requirements and still sees numbers like these tells us something important: accessibility isn’t solved by legislation alone. As the US experience shows, the real change has to happen in how development, product, and design teams treat accessibility as a default — not an afterthought.

South Korea’s Digital Inclusion Act sets the obligation. But obligation and culture are two different things.

What Developers and PMs Can Do Right Now

No sweeping refactors needed. Here’s what you can start on today.

① Audit your alt text Open browser dev tools and inspect your image alt attributes directly, or run a scan with axe or Lighthouse. Start by distinguishing between images missing alt entirely and decorative images using alt="".

② Navigate with just the keyboard Put the mouse aside and Tab through your page from top to bottom. Can you see where focus is at all times? Does it move in a logical order? Can you reach every button and link?

③ Add skip navigation A “Skip to main content” link at the top of the page takes just a few lines of HTML and CSS.

<a href="#main-content" class="skip-link">Skip to main content</a>

<main id="main-content">
  <!-- Page content -->
</main>

④ Fix your heading structure One H1 per page. H2 for major sections. H3 for subsections. Heading levels should reflect document structure — not visual size.

Wrapping Up

An overall average of 70.4 points is real progress. And the fact that South Korea publishes this as an officially approved annual statistic signals genuine commitment to improvement.

But alt text at 17.1%, skip navigation at 33.2% — there’s still a long way to go.

Accessibility isn’t a special feature. It’s the closest thing we have to the original intent of the web: that information should be equally available to everyone.

Start with the page you’re working on today. Add alt text to one image. That’s how it begins.

Source: This post is based on the 「2025 Web Information Accessibility Survey」 report published by South Korea’s National Information Society Agency (NIA).

• 2025 Web Information Accessibility Survey Report (NIA, South Korea)
• Korean Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.2 — KS X OT0003 (Korea National Radio Research Agency)