The state of online store accessibility, 2026

Of the 90 online stores we tested, the homepage alone showed:

• 81% had at least one serious accessibility failure (a critical or serious WCAG issue).
• 49% had at least one critical issue, the kind that can hard-block a screen-reader user.
• Only 8%, fewer than one in twelve, passed every automated check.
• The median store had 17 detectable issues on its homepage; some had hundreds.

These are detectable failures from an automated scan. They are the floor, not the ceiling (more on that below). And to be clear: this is 81% of the stores we tested, a curated sample of well-known storefronts, not a census of all of e-commerce.

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

• Colour contrast (38%) — text that does not meet the 4.5:1 ratio, WCAG 1.4.3. This was the single most common WCAG failure, and our number includes text on CSS gradients that most scanners leave unchecked.
• Touch target size (33%) — controls smaller than the 24×24px minimum, WCAG 2.5.8.
• Links with no discernible text (28%) — usually icon-only links, WCAG 2.4.4 / 4.1.2.
• Images missing alt text (22%) — WCAG 1.1.1.
• Buttons with no accessible name (20%) — typically icon-only buttons, WCAG 4.1.2.

Structural best-practice issues were even more widespread, content not contained in landmarks showed up on 67% of stores, but those are advisory rather than WCAG success-criterion failures, so we have kept them separate from the figures above.

Breaking the well-sampled categories down by the share with at least one critical or serious issue:

• Home & furniture — 100% (of 10 tested)
• Beauty — 86% (of 7)
• Big-box / general retail — 83% (of 6)
• Fashion & apparel — 79% (of 24, our largest category)
• Footwear — 67% (of 6)
• Direct-to-consumer brands — 64% (of 14)

The direct-to-consumer brands fared best, which fits, they tend to run leaner, newer front-end stacks, but even there roughly two in three had a serious failure. Smaller categories (electronics, food, craft) had too few stores in our sample to report a reliable rate, though all of them skewed heavily toward failures.

Here is the number that matters most for honesty: the median store also had 24 items flagged as "needs human review", things an automated test cannot decide on its own, like whether alt text is accurate or whether a custom widget is actually operable by keyboard.

Automated testing only covers the machine-checkable part of WCAG, which independent research puts at roughly a third of the success criteria. So the failure rates above are almost certainly an undercount of the real barriers on these sites, not an exaggeration. If 81% fail the parts a machine can check, the share with some accessibility barrier is higher still.

The takeaway is not that these stores are breaking the law, automated failures are not a legal compliance verdict, and we are naming no one. The takeaway is that accessibility on even well-resourced storefronts is still the exception, and that the fixes are mostly ordinary front-end work: contrast, alt text, button and link names, labels.

These are fixes that belong in the code itself, not in a layer added on top of it, which is why the durable path is to find the real issues and correct them at the source. You can see where your own store stands with the free scan, or wire it into CI with the CLI and GitHub Action so it does not regress.

In the interest of not overclaiming:

• Sample: homepages of 90 popular online stores across categories, scanned in June 2026. We attempted 102; 12 were excluded because they returned bot-protection or error pages instead of the real homepage. This is a curated sample of recognisable storefronts, not a random or traffic-ranked one, so read it as a snapshot of popular stores rather than a statistical census.
• Engine: the axe-core rules for WCAG 2.x Level A and AA, plus our own resolution of colour contrast over CSS gradients.
• Scope: homepages only. Product pages, search, and checkout flows often fare worse.
• 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 legal determination, and automated testing does not cover the criteria that need a human. We have reported aggregate figures only and named no individual store.