A Snapshot of Web Accessibility in 2023

The WebAIM Million Report

Last week, the 2023 WebAIM Million report was published. The report is an accessibility evaluation of the home pages for the top 1,000,000 web sites. It uses the WAVE tool to detect accessibility barriers and WCAG conformance failures. It also provides insights into the current state of web accessibility and trends over time.

Key takeaways

  • 96.8% of home pages had detected WCAG 2 failures, which means they are not accessible or compliant for users with disabilities. The average number of errors per page was 50.8.
  • The most common accessibility errors were low contrast text, missing alternative text for images, unlabeled form inputs, improper heading structure and skipped heading levels. These errors account for 96.5% of all errors detected and have a notable impact on end users with disabilities.
  • Home page complexity increased significantly in 12 months, from an average of 887 elements to 955 elements per page.
  • ARIA usage increased 26% in one year and nearly tripled since 2019, but it also correlated with higher detected errors.

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