WebAIM has conducted an updated analysis of the home pages for the world’s top one million web sites. The results reveal the current state of web accessibility and spotlight the greatest opportunities for improvement. As WebAIM celebrates its 20th year, we hope this information will prompt positive change.
For details, see the full WebAIM Million report is available at https://webaim.org/projects/million/.
The original analysis of the top one million home pages was conducted in February 2019. This re-analysis shows changes over the last year.
New for 2020:
- New analysis of over 100,000 interior pages from within the top 1,300 sites (up to 100 pages each). This allows accessibility comparisons between home pages and internal content pages.
- Comparisons based on content categories. Thank you to webshrinker.com for supporting this research by providing the category data.
- Comparisons based on the declared document language.
- Additional trends and patterns over the last year.
Highlights (and lowlights) of this year’s analysis, compared with February 2019:
- Detectable WCAG failure rate rose from 97.8% to 98.1%.
- Average number of detectable errors per page was 60.9, a 2.1% increase from 2019.
- Home pages and interior pages scored about the same.
- Home page complexity (number of elements per page) rose 10.4% in 12 months, from an average of 782 elements per page to 864.
- On average, home pages had 36 distinct instances of low-contrast text.
- 31.3% of all home page images (12 per page on average) had missing alternative text.
- 56% of the 3.4 million form inputs identified were unlabeled.
- 64.6% of the one million home pages used ARIA (excluding ARIA landmark roles).
- Home pages with ARIA present averaged 60% more errors than those without.
- There were significant differences in the number of errors based on the content category of home pages. News, weather, and information sites, for example, had twice as many errors as governmental sites.
- 71.4% of pages specified a valid document language. Pages in Japanese, French, English, and Dutch fared the best, whereas pages in Farsi, Chinese, Russian, and Portuguese fared the worst.
There is much, much more in the full WebAIM Million report.
