Design Domination Podcast Episode #191: 2025 State of Website Accessibility

Music: https://www.bensound.com

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This is the seventh year that WebAIM has conducted an accessibility evaluation of the top 1 million websites. They check the home pages with WAVE, their automated checker.

They choose the sites to evaluate based on their Tranco rankings. They do not include home pages that have fewer than 10 HTML elements or pages with more than 5,000 links to the same domain.

I covered the 2024 WebAIM Million report last year as well, in case you want to compare those findings to this year’s.

Overall, the selection of this year’s home pages included an average of 1,465 elements, much more than last year’s selection, which was a little over a thousand elements.

OK, so let’s dive into this data dump. All data is copyright WebAIM.

WCAG Conformance

WebAIM defined errors as:

WAVE-detected accessibility barriers having notable end user impact, and which have a very high likelihood of being WCAG 2.2 Level A/AA conformance failures.

WebAIM found that almost 95% of home pages had detectable WCAG failures—an average of 51 errors per page. In 2024, it was about 96% and almost 57 errors per page.

So not much of a difference from last year. In fact, there hasn’t been much of a difference since 2019—only a 3% decrease overall.

Categories

WebAIM also shared the categories of the websites they evaluated. The sites that contained the highest number of errors—ranking from the bottom and up to the middle—were in the categories of:

• Shopping, with an average of 71 errors;
• Sports;
• Style and fashion;
• Home and garden;
• News/weather/information;
• Hobbies and interests;
• Travel;
• Automotive;
• Pets;
• Gambling/casinos;
• Arts and entertainment;
• Adult content;
• Real estate;
• Gaming; and
• Family and parenting, with an average of 52 errors.

These industries would be good for finding clients.

On the other side of things, some of the categories of sites that fared the best—ranking from top to the middle of the list—were:

• Government, with an average of 37 errors;
• Personal finance;
• Nonprofit/charity;
• Law, government and politics;
• Social media;
• Technology and computing;
• Science;
• Careers;
• Business;
• Society;
• Education;
• Health and fitness;
• Religion and spirituality; and
• Food and drink, with an average of 50 errors.

Languages

WebAIM also noted page languages. About 85% of pages specified a document language.

More than half of the home pages they evaluated were in English and had an average of almost 40 errors.

At the other end of the spectrum, with an average of 86 errors, were pages in Korean.

Accessibility of Content Management Systems and Website Builders

The study also noted the content management systems and website builders.

The lowest average number of errors were using Divi and Webflow. That is interesting because Divi is notoriously poor for accessibility.

The highest average number of errors—97—were on sites using 1C-Bitrix (whatever that is). The next was wpBakery at about 63 errors on average and Elementor, with an average of 51 errors.

WebAIM also noted that most pages using a common CMS had fewer errors than average.

E-commerce Platforms

They noted three e-commerce platforms—Shopify, Woo Commerce and Magento.

Remember how I said shopping sites ranked the worst?

Well, Shopify pages had an average of almost 70 errors, Woo Commerce 75 and Magento about 85 errors.

Website Accessibility Errors

WebAIM classified the accessibility errors into six categories:

1. Low-contrast text,
2. Missing Alt-text,
3. Missing form input labels,
4. Empty hyperlinks,
5. Empty buttons,
6. Missing language.

Low-contrast Text

Low-contrast text was found on 79% of home pages. Home pages averaged almost 30 low-contrast issues each.

Last year, low-contrast text accounted for 81% of home pages and almost 35 instances per home page.

Users with low vision and other visual disabilities—even users without a visual disability—cannot read low-contrast text.

Missing Alt-text

Alt-text on images was missing on 55.5% of home pages. This increased by 1% over last year.

An average of 11 images per page were missing Alt-text.

About 13% of images that had Alt-text had questionable or repetitive Alt-text, such as “image,” “graphic,” “blank,” a file name or Alt-text that was redundant with nearby text.

Accurate and sufficient Alt-text is important to help users of assistive technology understand the content of images.

Missing Form Input Labels

Missing form input labels were found on about 48% of home pages.

There were an average of about 6 form inputs (such as form fields) on each home page.

More than a third of them were improperly labeled by use of the label tag, ARIA or a title.

Form input labels are important to help users complete a form with the necessary information.

Empty Hyperlinks

Empty hyperlinks were found on about 45% of home pages.

Other hyperlink issues, such as ambiguous link text such as “click here,” “more” or “continue,” were found on almost 14% of home pages. This was an increase from 2024.

Hyperlinks with the proper text are important so that users know where a link will take them.

Empty Buttons

Empty buttons were found on almost 30% of pages. This increased from last year.

That means blind or low vision users will not understand the purpose of the buttons, such as submit, reset, filter, search, etc.

Missing Document Language

About 16% of pages were missing a set document language.

Why is a page language important? So that web browsers will display characters correctly. Also, users of assistive technology will get the content in the correct language. For example, if a screen reader user has the specific language pack installed, the content will be voiced correctly. Otherwise, it will sound like a bad accent and may not be understandable.

Other Accessibility Issues

Misuse of or skipped headings

About 16% of home pages had multiple H1s.

Skipped heading levels were found on 39% of home pages.

About 10% of home pages had no headings at all.

Headings are used by screen readers to navigate the content of a page. I talked more about headings in episode 164 on accessible headings.

ARIA errors

Approximately 79% of the evaluated home pages used ARIA, an increase from 2024.

Home pages with ARIA had more than twice as many errors than pages without ARIA.

Note: ARIA itself is not the issue. It’s usually misuse or incorrect ARIA.

Many well-meaning web developers think they are making content more accessible by adding ARIA, when in fact, they often make it less so!

The first rule of ARIA is don’t use ARIA!

Lack of skip links

Only about 13% of home pages had a skip link, which was a decrease—no bueno.

I talked about the importance of skip links and how to add a skip link in episode 145.

Improperly coded tables

Improperly coded tables were another issue that WebAIM found.

Only about 17% of them were properly coded.

The problem with that is that users of assistive technology may not be able to understand the contents of the table.

What to Do With the WebAIM Data

OK, so those are most of their findings.

Remember: These were only found from performing automated checks. Automated checkers, on average, can only detect a fraction of accessibility issues. This means that the accessibility of these sites is likely worse than what’s noted in the report.

So what should you do with this information?

Well, this data gives you a starting point for what to review and fix on your website and any others you may take care of for clients.

Also remember: Addressing these issues won’t mean a fully accessible website. There is much more to do. But fixing these issues will take care of low-hanging fruit.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed or confused about getting started with web accessibility, register to watch my free workshop, 3 Easy Steps Into Web Accessibility. You’ll find out 3 easy steps into web accessibility that you can do today plus 3 common mistakes most web designers and developers make when they get into accessibility.