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, so the real number of barriers is higher (see below). The 81% applies to the stores we tested, a curated sample of well-known storefronts. It is not a measurement of e-commerce as a whole.

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. Those are advisory rather than WCAG success-criterion failures, so we have kept them out of 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)

Direct-to-consumer brands fared best, possibly because they tend to run leaner, newer front-end stacks. Even so, 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.

The median store also had 24 items flagged as "needs human review". These are cases an automated test cannot settle on its own, like whether alt text is accurate or whether a custom widget works from the keyboard. Stores had the highest count of any sector in this series.

Automated testing covers only the machine-checkable part of WCAG, which independent research puts at roughly a third of the success criteria. So the failure rates above understate the real barriers on these sites. If 81% fail on what a machine can check, the share with some accessibility barrier is higher still.

None of this is a finding that any store is breaking the law. Automated failures are not a legal verdict, and we are naming no one. What the data does show is that well-resourced retailers still ship homepages with contrast, alt text, labelling and button-name failures, all of which are routine front-end fixes.

Those fixes go into your theme templates and stylesheets. You can check your own storefront with the free scan, and the CLI and GitHub Action can fail a deploy that brings them back.

• 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.