The state of government website accessibility, 2026

Of the 94 federal government homepages we tested, the homepage alone showed:

• 67% had at least one serious accessibility failure (a critical or serious WCAG issue), two in three.
• 18% had at least one critical issue: under one in five, and the lowest critical rate of any sector we have scanned.
• 12%, about one in eight, passed every automated check.
• The median site had just 6 detectable issues on its homepage, though the worst had 118.

All of these are detectable failures, the ones an automated scan can see, and the real count is higher. The sample is federal agency and service homepages chosen because people recognise them. State and local government sites are not in it.

We have now run the identical scan over three sectors, which lets us line them up on the same yardstick. Federal sites came out ahead of both:

• At least one critical issue: 18% of government sites, versus 35% of hospitals and 49% of online stores.
• Median issues per homepage: 6, versus 8 for hospitals and 17 for stores.
• Median items needing human review: just 2, versus 15 for hospitals and 24 for stores.

That last number stands out most. A low "needs review" count means the markup is predictable enough for an automated test to reach a verdict. The most likely explanation is the US Web Design System, the shared, accessibility-first component library that federal agencies are steered toward. When teams build from accessible components instead of hand-rolling everything, it shows up in the data. Of the sectors in this series, this is the clearest case for a shared design system.

Government is the one sector with a black-letter legal duty here. Section 508 has required accessible federal websites for more than two decades, and its standard now points at WCAG 2.0 Level AA. Even so, two in three of these homepages still shipped a serious failure, about the same rate as hospital sites.

A mandate and an accessible design system narrow the gap: government pages are cleaner than anything else we have scanned. They do not close it. A component library only helps on the parts of a page built from it, and we suspect most of the remaining failures sit in custom pieces added around it, though we did not trace each one.

Ranked by the share of tested sites affected, the recurring WCAG problems were:

• Colour contrast (22%) — text that does not meet the 4.5:1 ratio, WCAG 1.4.3. As in every sector we have tested, this was the most common WCAG failure, and our figure includes text on CSS gradients that most scanners skip.
• Touch target size (21%) — controls smaller than the 24×24px minimum, WCAG 2.5.8.
• Images missing alt text (10%) — WCAG 1.1.1.
• Links with no discernible text (9%) — usually icon-only links, WCAG 2.4.4 / 4.1.2.

The top two match what we found on stores and hospitals, which suggests contrast and target size are general problems rather than sector ones. Structural best-practice issues were more widespread than any single WCAG failure. Content not contained in landmarks showed up on 50% of sites and non-unique landmarks on 34%. Those are advisory rather than WCAG success-criterion failures, so we have kept them out of the figures above.

The median government site had just 2 items flagged as "needs human review", cases an automated test cannot decide on its own, like whether alt text is accurate or whether a custom form works from the keyboard.

Automated testing still covers only the machine-checkable part of WCAG, roughly a third of the success criteria according to independent research, so the failure rates above are a lower bound. Fewer automated failures show that the layer a machine can see is in better shape than elsewhere. They do not prove the sites are fully usable.

No agency is named here, and an automated failure is not a Section 508 finding. The data is still useful to anyone weighing a design system: the sector with a legal mandate and a shared accessible component library produced the cleanest results we have measured. It also left a serious failure on two-thirds of homepages, so neither measure finishes the job.

The leftover failures are routine front-end work (contrast, alt text, link and button names) on the parts a component library does not cover. Check your own pages with the free scan, or put the CLI and GitHub Action in front of each release.

• Sample: homepages of 94 US federal government sites, scanned in July 2026. We attempted 110; 16 were excluded because they returned bot-protection blocks (HTTP 403), protocol errors, or did not resolve, rather than a real homepage. Federal sites sit behind aggressive bot mitigation more often than commercial ones, which is the main reason for the exclusions. This is a curated sample of recognisable federal agencies and services, not a random or traffic-ranked one, and it does not include state or local government. Those are covered separately in our Title II scan of 191 state, city, county and public university homepages.
• Engine: the axe-core rules for WCAG 2.x Level A and AA, plus our own resolution of colour contrast over CSS gradients. The same engine and settings we used for the stores and hospitals reports, so all three are directly comparable.
• Scope: homepages only. Application flows behind them (benefits enrolment, tax filing, form wizards) often fare worse, and are where custom code outside the design system tends to live.
• As loaded: pages were scanned as they rendered, including any cookie or consent overlays, which can both add and mask issues.
• Not a compliance audit: detectable WCAG failures are not a Section 508 determination, and automated testing does not cover the criteria that need a human. We have reported aggregate figures only and named no individual agency.