96.3% of home pages had detected WCAG failures

Here are some key highlights from the WebAIM Million 2023 report.
Of the 1 million home pages tested:

• An average of 50 distinct accessibility errors were found per page
• 96.3% of home pages had detected WCAG failures
• 83.6% of home pages had a Low Contrast Text failure
• 22.1% of all home page images had missing alternative text (an average of 9.6 per page)
• 35.8% of home pages had improperly labeled form inputs
• 42.2% of all pages had skipped heading levels present
• An average of 77 ARIA attributes per page detected

As an accessibility advocate, these results are… disheartening.

WebAIM (Web Accessibility in Mind) is a non-profit organization from the Institute for Disability Research, Policy, and Practice at Utah State University.

Earlier in 2023, they published the results of their fifth accessibility report on the top one million pages called “WebAIM Million”. They used their WAVE accessibility evaluation tool to run automated accessibility tests on the top million sites.

The worst thing about these results: these are the simplest errors to fix and most absentminded to make.

Consider this: every single one of these errors was detected using an automated testing tool. There was no accessibility expert combing through each site to find the most obscure WCAG issue.

Meaning: This was all low-hanging fruit. Any decent accessibility tool would have caught these. But the tools either weren’t used or their findings were ignored.

You didn’t even need to be an accessibility expert to address these issues. This is Web Development 101 stuff.

• Have a text box? Use a programmatically assigned label.
• Have an image? Give it…