Web accessibility statistics

WebAIM tests the home pages of the top one million websites every year. In the February 2026 edition:

• 95.9% of home pages had detectable WCAG 2 failures. That figure has risen four years running (it was 94.8% in 2025).
• The average home page had 56.1 distinct errors, up 10% on the previous year.
• Across a million pages, automated testing found more than 56 million separate errors.
• Just six error types account for 96% of everything detected, so most of the problem is concentrated and fixable.

Share of home pages affected by each issue (WebAIM Million, 2026):

• Low-contrast text: 83.9%. The most common failure by a wide margin.
• Missing image alt text: 53.1%.
• Missing form input labels: 51.0%.
• Empty links: 46.3%.
• Empty buttons: 30.6%.
• Missing document language: 13.5%.

None of these are hard to fix once you know where they are.

ARIA is markup meant to improve accessibility. WebAIM found the opposite in practice. Home pages using ARIA averaged 59.1 errors, against 42 errors on pages with no ARIA at all. The more ARIA a page used, the more errors it tended to have, because ARIA is so often applied incorrectly. Plain, correct HTML beats accessibility features bolted on without care.

Accessibility failures are the rule, not the exception. They also cluster into a small set of recurring problems, most of which an automated test catches in seconds. The rest need a person to judge. Tools that promise instant compliance with a single line of JavaScript do not fix any of the errors above, which is why the only reliable approach is still to scan, fix the code, and re-test.

All figures are from the WebAIM Million (February 2026), an automated accessibility analysis of the home pages of the top one million websites. Automated testing detects the machine-verifiable subset of WCAG, so real-world failure rates including manual issues are higher still. WebAIM publishes a new edition each year.