Web accessibility by industry, 2026

Across 342 homepages in four sectors, ranked by the share with at least one critical issue (the kind that can hard-block a screen-reader user), lower is better:

Government came out most accessible and online stores least, with a nearly threefold gap in critical-issue rate between them (18% versus 49%). The three non-retail sectors cluster tightly on the broad "any serious failure" measure, all around two in three, but pull apart on the severe end and on sheer issue volume, where the median store had more than twice the issues of the median government site. Full write-ups: government, banks and finance, hospitals, online stores.

The government row above is federal only. We later scanned 191 state, city, county and public university homepages, the entities covered by the ADA Title II deadline, and they came out behind their federal counterparts: 77% with a serious failure and a median of 9 issues. That write-up is state, city and university websites one year from the deadline.

First, what they have in common. Across all 342 sites, 71% had at least one serious failure on the homepage, and only 10% passed every automated check. Even the best-performing sector still shipped a serious failure on two-thirds of its homepages. So read this as a ranking of degrees. The gap between first and last is real, but first place is still a long way from good.

Money and legal exposure do not explain the ranking. Banks have large budgets and heavy lawsuit exposure, and they landed in the middle. Online retail is the most commercially sophisticated sector of the four and came last. If budget and lawsuit risk decided this, you would expect a different order.

What does line up with the result is a shared, accessible component system. Government has one, the US Web Design System, and it is both the cleanest sector and the one whose pages look most standardised to a scanner. The number that points to this has nothing to do with pass rates:

• Median items needing human review: 2 for government, 2 for banks, but 15 for hospitals and 24 for online stores.

A low "needs review" count means predictable, semantic markup that an automated test can reach a verdict on, which is what consistent use of a design system tends to produce. Banks match government on this measure, and we do not know why. Large banks may build on shared enterprise platforms, but we did not check, so treat that as a guess. Hospitals and stores sit much higher. For a team deciding where to put effort, starting from an accessible component library looks like it pays off more than auditing after the fact, though four sectors is a small basis for a rule.

Whatever the sector, the top of the list barely changed. Across all 342 sites, the most common WCAG failures were:

• Colour contrast (30%) — WCAG 1.4.3. The single most common failure in every sector we tested, and our figure includes text on CSS gradients that most scanners skip.
• Touch target size (20%) — controls under 24×24px, WCAG 2.5.8.
• Images missing alt text (14%) and links with no discernible text (14%) — WCAG 1.1.1 and 2.4.4 / 4.1.2.
• Buttons with no accessible name (11%) — WCAG 4.1.2.

Contrast led in every sector. Target size came second on stores and government sites and tied for second on hospital sites; banks were the exception, with missing alt text in second place. The useful part of an otherwise grim picture is that the most widespread barriers are also among the most mechanical to find and fix. A design pass on colour contrast and hit-target sizes alone would move the numbers in every industry here.

None of this is a legal verdict. Automated failures are not a compliance determination, we tested homepages rather than whole sites, and we name no organisation in any sector. The combined data supports narrower points: accessibility on major US websites is still the exception, the best-ranked sector builds from a shared accessible component library, and the most common barriers are among the easiest to fix.

To see how your own site compares with these sectors, run the free scan on your homepage. The CLI and GitHub Action run the same checks in CI.

• Sample: 342 homepages that returned a real page, out of 391 attempted, across four curated sector samples (online stores, US health systems, US federal government, and US banks and financial services), scanned across mid-2026. The excluded 49 mostly returned bot-protection blocks or protocol errors; the exclusion rate was far higher for banks and government than for stores and hospitals, which is discussed in those individual reports. These are curated samples of recognisable organisations, not random or traffic-ranked ones, so read the ranking as a comparison of well-known sites in each sector, not a census.
• Engine: the axe-core rules for WCAG 2.x Level A and AA, plus our own resolution of colour contrast over CSS gradients, applied identically to every sector so the numbers are comparable.
• Scope: homepages only. Checkout, patient portals, government application flows, and online banking sit behind the homepage and often fare worse.
• Not a compliance audit: detectable WCAG failures are not a legal determination, and automated testing covers only the machine-checkable part of WCAG, roughly a third of the success criteria. The real barrier rates are almost certainly higher than the figures here. We report aggregate figures only.