This figure was not invented. In the WebAIM Million study cited by the original article, 96.8% of tested home pages had detectable WCAG failures. Accessibility matters to our team because it has both ethical and practical consequences and increasingly overlaps with broader website quality.
Many accessibility problems are not especially expensive or complicated to fix. They do, however, require time for auditing, implementation and testing. The practical benefit is that more users can navigate and understand the website successfully.
Main points from the study
WebAIM analyzes approximately one million home pages with automated tools. The organization also emphasizes the limitations of automated testing: tools such as WAVE cannot detect every WCAG failure, so a page with no automatically detected error is not necessarily fully accessible.
The original study discussed in this article also reported many detectable errors per page on average, showing that the issue was not limited to one isolated mistake.
WebAIM has repeated the Million analysis annually, making it possible to observe changes over time as web pages become more complex and accessibility practices evolve.
Common errors
Low-contrast text is one of the most common automatically detectable problems. Contrast should be evaluated against WCAG criteria rather than simply assuming that two visibly different colors are sufficient.
Missing alternative text is another frequent problem. The primary purpose of alt text is accessibility: it communicates the meaning or function of an image to users who cannot see it. Decorative images can generally be marked with empty alternative text so assistive technology can ignore them. Descriptive alt text can also help search engines understand image context, but it should not be treated as a place for keyword stuffing.
Empty links and empty buttons are also problematic because assistive technologies may be unable to determine their purpose. Broken or non-functional controls create an even broader usability problem for all users.
Form inputs need programmatically associated labels or other accessible names. A visual placeholder alone is often insufficient for users of screen readers and can disappear as soon as text is entered.
Finally, the document language should be declared in the HTML element so that assistive technologies can select the appropriate pronunciation and language rules.
Different categories
The study also compares error patterns across categories, languages, technologies and top-level domains. Those comparisons describe the measured sample at the time of the study and should not be interpreted as permanent characteristics of an entire country, language or platform.
Likewise, the presence of WordPress, an e-commerce platform or a website builder does not by itself determine accessibility. Templates, plugins, content practices and implementation decisions all affect the final result.
Summary
This overview highlights several recurring accessibility problems. The field continues to improve as standards, tools, browsers and assistive technologies evolve. Regular automated testing is useful, but it should be combined with manual review and, where possible, testing by people who use assistive technologies.