Website accessibility statistics

What percentage of websites have accessibility errors?

• 95.9% of the top one million homepages have detectable WCAG failures.
• That figure rose from 94.8% the year before, a step backward.
• Full WCAG 2 A/AA conformance was certainly lower than 4.1% of pages.
• The 2026 result reversed six years of gradual improvement.
• Automated scans catch only a fraction of what manual audits would find.

The scale of the problem is hard to overstate. When fewer than one in twenty top homepages passes even an automated scan, accessibility is not an edge case for a few sites, it is a near-universal gap affecting the entire web.

What is the average number of accessibility errors per page?

• Homepages averaged 56.1 detectable accessibility errors each in 2026.
• That is up 10.1% from 51 errors per page the year before.
• Across one million pages, over 56 million distinct errors were found.
• Roughly 1 in 26 page elements has a detectable error.
• Page complexity jumped 22.5% in a year, to 1,437 elements per page.

Rising complexity is the engine behind the decline. As pages pack in more elements, third-party frameworks and AI-assisted code, the surface area for errors grows faster than teams fix them, so the per-page count keeps climbing.

What are the most common website accessibility failures?

• Low-contrast text is the most common issue, affecting 83.9% of pages, up from 79.1% the year before.
• Missing alternative text on images affects 53.1% of pages, down slightly from 55.5%.
• The rest of the top six are missing form labels, empty links, empty buttons and missing document language.
• Just six categories account for about 96% of all detected errors.
• These same six have topped the list for seven consecutive years.

The encouraging flip side is how fixable this is. These are not obscure technical edge cases but the basics, and because six issues drive nearly all failures, targeted attention to them would dramatically improve accessibility across the whole web.

How many homepages meet WCAG conformance?

• Full WCAG 2 A/AA conformance was certainly under 4.1% of homepages.
• Pages using ARIA averaged more errors (59.1) than those without it (42).
• ARIA usage itself rose 27% in a single year and is over six times higher than in 2019.
• As accessibility practitioners put it, “no ARIA is better than bad ARIA.”
• Manual audits uncover far more issues than automated scans alone.

The ARIA paradox is a useful warning. Code meant to improve accessibility often makes it worse when applied carelessly, which is why well-built simple markup usually beats complex markup patched with accessibility attributes.

How is web accessibility trending year over year?

• 2026 reversed six straight years of slow improvement.
• Errors per page rose from 51 to 56.1, a 10.1% jump.
• The WCAG failure rate climbed from 94.8% to 95.9%.
• Progress over the prior several years had been modest even before this reversal.
• The reversal is linked to AI-assisted coding and rising page complexity.

The trend line is the real warning. After years of inching forward, the web is now sliding backward on accessibility, suggesting that faster, more automated development is outpacing the care needed to keep sites usable for everyone.

How many web accessibility lawsuits are filed each year?

Note: lawsuit counts come from legal-industry trackers like UsableNet and vary by year and methodology.

• More than 5,000 digital accessibility lawsuits were filed in the US in 2025, including state courts.
• Ecommerce and retail sites remain the most common target, at roughly 70% of cases.
• Food service follows at about 21%, with healthcare representing about 2% to 3% of cases in UsableNet’s 2025 data.
• The Supreme Court’s 2019 decision not to hear Domino’s Pizza’s appeal left in place a Ninth Circuit ruling that Title III of the ADA can apply to websites and apps connected to physical places of public accommodation.
• Resolution timelines vary widely depending on whether a case settles quickly, proceeds through litigation or requires remediation commitments.

Accessibility is now a legal and financial risk, not just an ethical one. With thousands of suits filed yearly and online stores the top target, the basics of WCAG compliance have become a practical safeguard for any business operating on the web. See our ecommerce platform research.

Sources & additional resources

• WebAIM. “The WebAIM Million: Accessibility of the Top 1,000,000 Home Pages.” WebAIM.
• UsableNet. “ADA Web Lawsuit Trends for 2026: What 2025 Filings Reveal.” UsableNet.
• Searchlab. “Digital Accessibility Statistics 2026.” Searchlab.
• Nexer Digital. “The WebAIM Million Report 2026: What It Tells Us.” Nexer Digital.
• W3C. “Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).” W3C Web Accessibility Initiative.
• W3C WAI. “Read Me First: No ARIA Is Better Than Bad ARIA.” W3C Web Accessibility Initiative.
• Seyfarth Shaw LLP. “Supreme Court Declines to Review Ninth Circuit Decision in Robles v. Domino’s.” ADA Title III.

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