Imagine visiting a website where one out of every 24 things you try to interact with simply doesn’t work. No labels on the form fields. Buttons that say nothing. Text you can barely read against the background. For the 1.3 billion people worldwide living with a disability, this isn’t hypothetical. It’s Tuesday.
Every year, the nonprofit WebAIM (Web Accessibility In Mind) scans the homepages of the top one million websites to see how they measure up against the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). The 2025 report — the seventh in the series — is out, and the results are sobering.
The big picture: nearly 95% still fail
Across one million homepages, WebAIM detected over 50.9 million distinct accessibility errors. That works out to an average of 51 errors per homepage. And 94.8% of the pages tested had at least one detectable WCAG 2.2 Level AA failure.
There is a silver lining — sort of. The average number of errors per page dropped 10.3% compared to 2024, when it sat at 56.8. But let’s be honest: going from “catastrophic” to “slightly less catastrophic” isn’t exactly cause for celebration.
To put this in human terms: a person using assistive technology — a screen reader, keyboard navigation, or voice control — can expect to hit an accessibility barrier on roughly 1 in every 24 elements on a typical homepage. That’s not a minor inconvenience. It’s a locked door.
The same six problems, every single year
Here’s what’s frustrating. The report identifies six error types that account for a staggering 96% of all detected issues. And they’ve been the same six for five years running:
- Low contrast text — found on 79.1% of pages
- Missing alt text on images — 55.5% of pages
- Empty links — links that go somewhere but announce nothing to a screen reader
- Missing form input labels — form fields with no programmatic label
- Empty buttons — buttons with no accessible name
- Missing document language — the page doesn’t declare what language it’s in
None of these are exotic technical challenges. Every one of them has a straightforward fix that most web professionals could implement in an afternoon. Low contrast? Adjust your colour palette. Missing alt text? Describe your images. Empty buttons? Add a label.
The fact that these same basic issues persist across millions of pages, year after year, suggests the problem isn’t technical. It’s cultural. Accessibility still isn’t part of most teams’ standard workflow.
More code, more problems
Websites are getting more complex — and that’s making things worse. The average homepage now contains 1,257 elements, up 7.1% from the year before. Over the past six years, page complexity has surged by 61%.
More elements mean more opportunities for error. And here’s an irony: ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) attributes — code specifically designed to improve accessibility — are being used more than ever, but pages with ARIA actually average more errors than pages without it. The tool meant to help is being misused, often layering complexity onto problems that semantic HTML would have solved more simply.
WordPress deserves a special mention. It powers roughly 24% of the pages in the study — nearly a quarter of the web. WordPress itself is committed to accessibility and includes built-in features like a contrast checker. But WordPress-built pages still show error rates at or above the overall average. The platform provides the tools; the gap is in how people use them.
Why this matters in Canada right now
If you work for a federal department, Crown corporation, or any federally regulated organization in Canada, these numbers should sharpen your attention. In December 2025, the Canadian government published new amendments to the Accessible Canada Regulations that introduce enforceable digital accessibility requirements, with compliance deadlines starting in 2027. The standard is CAN/ASC – EN 301 549, which incorporates WCAG 2.1 AA.
In other words, the same types of errors WebAIM flags — missing alt text, poor contrast, unlabelled forms — are the exact issues that will determine whether your organization meets its legal obligations. The WebAIM Million is essentially a preview of your next compliance audit.
What you can do this week
You don’t need a six-figure contract or a team of specialists to start. Here’s a practical first step: go to wave.webaim.org, enter your website’s URL, and run a free scan. You’ll get an instant, visual breakdown of errors on your homepage — the same tool WebAIM uses for the Million report.
Then focus on the six. Fix your contrast. Write meaningful alt text. Label your form fields and buttons. Declare your page language. These are not moonshot projects. They’re maintenance tasks that any web professional can tackle.
The bottom line: 95% of websites are failing at accessibility — but the fixes for the most common problems are neither expensive nor complicated. Run a free WAVE scan on your homepage today, address what it finds, and you’ll already be ahead of nearly every site on the web. That’s not a bad place to start.
Sources:
- WebAIM — The WebAIM Million: 2025 Report
- Level Access — Canadian Accessibility Regulations & 2025 ACA Amendments
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