The WebAIM Million 2026 is a report that takes data from the top one million websites every year. The home page of each site is analysed automatically, which doesn’t produce a full picture of all possible accessibility issues. But it is reliable because it removes human biases and returns raw data that allows us to make comparisons and spot trends.
This year, the main takeaway is that accessibility on the most prominent websites is getting worse. The average number of accessibility errors per page has gone up 10.1% (from 51 to 56.1). Related to this, the complexity (measured by the number of elements on the page) has increased 22.5%. 95.9% of the pages analysed have some failure to comply with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2. Considering that automated tests can’t find all accessibility issues, this figure is astonishing.
Some of the most frequent errors haven’t changed: insufficient colour contrast, images without alternative text, and links with non-descriptive texts (like “click here”). These are still prevalent, even if they are easy to find with automated tools. For example, 83.9% of the pages have insufficient colour contrast. But it’s no surprise. In the article The use of colour is a frequent cause of accessibility issues, I wrote about some of the causes.
In the report, we also find that “Home pages with ARIA present had significantly more errors (59.1 on average) than pages without ARIA (42 on average).” As the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) points out, “No ARIA is better than Bad ARIA.” ARIA allows for the development of accessible custom interactive components, but this type of complexity is (according to the data) giving a worse output for accessibility. In the article A minimal approach to accessibility, I wrote more in-depth about this same issue.
A good example of how badly implemented simple accessibility measures are is the skip button. Also known as skip navigation or skip to content, it’s used to skip repeating elements on the header of the site, so people using keyboard navigation (or other assistive technologies) don’t have to iterate over the whole menu every time they go to a different page. This is now implemented in 17.1% of the pages. This is surprising, because it’s something really easy to implement. But what’s more important is that one in ten of these existing skip buttons was broken.
It’s not surprising that the category with a higher percentage of pages containing no errors is government. But what’s shocking is that the second category with more compliant pages is non-profit, and the second-to-last category is shopping. Not only do non-profit organisations usually not have big budgets (as the government does), but shopping seems to be one of the categories with the biggest incentive to make their platforms accessible and easy to use.
The main trend observed in this report, year by year, is that accessibility has not been a priority in the industry for a long time. There was a very small incremental improvement before this year, but even with that, no significant change in the trend can be observed. Some insights are very valuable, as they are actionable and backed by data. The big picture is a clear call to action (and business opportunity) for a company that wants to lead instead of following.
Fran Rosa. Senior Developer, Accessibility specialist, and people-first development advocate