A/HRC/43/41/Add.3 main agents for implementing universal design, while county governors monitor their actions. 27. The Special Rapporteur welcomes the commitment of the Directorate of Public Construction and Properties (Statsbygg) to make all governmental buildings accessible by 2025 and the support provided to municipalities to make schools accessible. However, she is concerned that efforts in this area are advancing slowly, there are few municipal plans to make existing buildings accessible and municipalities increasingly grant exceptions to this requirement. Furthermore, the action plan for the period 2015–2019 no longer made reference to the goal of having a universally designed Norway by 2025 and lacked concrete and targeted measures across sectors with earmarked funds. 28. According to official information received during the visit, a mapping of 784 primary schools conducted in 2013 revealed that 78 per cent of them had significant physical barriers, while another mapping conducted in 2017 indicated that 75 per cent of entrances to public buildings were not accessible to electric wheelchair users and that only 28 out of 336 railway stations were universally designed in 2017. The Special Rapporteur had direct experience of barriers to the physical environment during her stay in Norway and received many complaints about the daily challenges persons with disabilities face to navigate the built environment and access transportation, workplaces, schools, hospitals and private facilities open to the public, including places of recreation. 29. The Special Rapporteur urges the Government to accelerate and complete the process of transformation of the physical environment as soon as possible, address the current accessibility shortcomings in the new action plan for the period 2020–2025 and adopt regulations setting deadlines for making existing buildings and transport accessible to all persons with disabilities. 2. Access to information and communication 30. The Equality and Anti-Discrimination Act contains provisions on universal design for information and communications technologies (ICTs). The technical regulations are limited to online solutions for enterprises providing services to the general public and the education sector, whereby existing ICTs must meet the requirements from 2021 onwards, with exceptions for captioning and audio-description. Norway also aims to implement the European Web Accessibility Act, which extends the requirements of universal design to ICTs in the public sector. However, according to information provided by the Ministry of Culture, only 30 per cent of governmental bodies that have adopted an ICT strategy have included universal design as a requirement. 31. In recent years, the Government has invested heavily in the digitalization of public services and the development of digital tools, inter alia to rationalize resources. Owing to this rapid process, persons with disabilities, especially the blind and older persons with disabilities, increasingly face barriers to accessing public services. For instance, persons with visual impairments cannot access touch screens that are increasingly installed in places such as hospitals, banks or train stations, because they lack spoken instructions. Many websites in Norway are not accessible even with screen-readers and are very complex to navigate for persons with intellectual and other disabilities. 32. The Special Rapporteur welcomes the revision, in June 2019, of section 2-19 of the Broadcasting Act, which expands the obligation of the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation to make its programmes on national television channels available through closed captioning, to include sign language interpretation, audio-description and other means. The Act stipulates the same obligation for nationwide commercial television channels with an audience of 5 per cent or more of total viewers. The Special Rapporteur was informed that the related technical regulations would come into force in January 2020. 33. With regard to sign languages, in 2016 there were an estimated 600–700 professional Norwegian Sign Language interpreters for the deaf, hard-of-hearing and deafblind, with an average of 40–50 new interpreters graduating each year. In general, 7