Accessibility sounds like a specialist discipline. Most of it is not. Every year WebAIM runs an automated check across the home pages of the top one million websites. In the 2026 report, 95.9% of them had detectable WCAG 2 failures, averaging 56 errors per page. And 96% of those errors fell into just six categories, the same six for seven consecutive years.
None of the six needs a specialist. They need someone on the project to decide to check. This is what they are, why they happen, and how to test your own site before anyone else does.
What web accessibility actually means
Web accessibility is designing and building so that people with disabilities can perceive, operate and understand a website. That includes permanent conditions like blindness or motor impairment, temporary ones like a broken wrist or eye surgery, and situational ones like bright sunlight on a phone screen. Around one in four UK adults reports a disability, and everyone ages into the group.
The standard is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, WCAG, currently version 2.2. It has three levels: A, AA and AAA. When a client contract, a regulator or a procurement questionnaire says "accessible", it almost always means AA.
The six basics most sites miss
These are the six, with the share of home pages WebAIM found them on in February 2026. If your site has a problem, it is statistically one of these.
- Low contrast text, 83.9% of pages. Grey body copy on white, pale placeholder text, white text over a photo. WCAG AA asks for a 4.5:1 ratio for normal text and 3:1 for large text. Up from 79.1% in 2025, and the average offending page has 34 separate instances.
- Missing alt text, 53.1%. Images with no text alternative, so a screen reader either says "image" or reads out the filename. Worst when the image is a link, because the link then has no destination a blind user can hear.
- Unlabelled form fields, 51%. A field with a placeholder but no label. The placeholder disappears when you type, and a screen reader never gets it in the first place.
- Empty links, 46.3%. An icon or an image wrapped in a link with no text. Announced as "link", with nothing else.
- Empty buttons, 30.6%. The same problem on buttons: a search icon, a close cross, a hamburger, none of them named.
- Missing document language, 13.5%. A single attribute on the page telling assistive technology which language to pronounce. Trivial to add, and still absent on one page in seven.
Almost all of the web's accessibility failures are six problems repeated at scale. Fixing six things is a sprint, not a programme.
How to check your own site in an afternoon
You do not need a full audit to find out where you stand. Six steps, in order, and you will know more than most of the top million.
- 1Run a free automated scan. WAVE, Lighthouse in Chrome, or axe. All three catch the six errors above reliably. They will not catch everything, and WebAIM is explicit that automated results understate the real picture, but they catch the bulk.
- 2Unplug the mouse. Tab through the home page and one key journey. Can you always see where you are? Can you reach every control, open every menu, and close every overlay with Escape? If focus disappears or gets trapped, that is a failure.
- 3Turn on a screen reader for ten minutes. VoiceOver is built into every Mac and iPhone. Listen to the headings list, then the links list. If the links list says "learn more, learn more, learn more, read more", you have found the empty-link problem's better-dressed cousin.
- 4Zoom to 200%. Nothing should clip, overlap or scroll sideways. Text in fixed-height boxes is the usual casualty.
- 5Check motion and contrast settings. Turn on your operating system's reduce-motion setting and reload. Large animations should stop or simplify. Nothing on the page should flash.
- 6Fix the source, not the page. Put the contrast fix in the palette, the label in the form component, the alt text in the CMS as a required field. A fix on one page is a fix on one page. A fix in the system is permanent.
Why this is a design problem, not a code problem
Look at the six again. Contrast is a colour decision. Alt text is a content decision. An icon-only button is a layout decision. Link text that says "click here" is a copy decision. By the time a developer sees any of these, the choice has already been made in a design file, and the developer is faithfully reproducing it.
WebAIM found something else worth sitting with: pages that use ARIA, the code layer meant to make complex interfaces accessible, average more errors than pages that use none. Bolting accessibility on after the fact tends to add complexity faster than it removes barriers. The reliable route is simpler markup, a palette that passes before anyone opens a code editor, and a design system where the accessible version of a component is the only version. That is how we build ours: the contrast ratios live in the tokens, so a designer cannot pick a failing grey without leaving the system.
If you are about to brief a new site, put WCAG 2.2 AA in the brief as a requirement, in the same paragraph as the brand guidelines. It costs almost nothing at that point. It costs a great deal at any other.
Common questions
Is web accessibility a legal requirement in the UK?
The Equality Act 2010 requires service providers to make reasonable adjustments so disabled people are not put at a disadvantage, and a website is a service. Public sector bodies have their own regulations that name WCAG 2.2 AA directly. In the EU, the European Accessibility Act has applied to many private-sector digital services since June 2025. WCAG AA is the level regulators, procurement teams and courts mean when they say accessible.
Do accessibility overlay widgets make a site compliant?
No. An overlay is a script that adjusts the page after it loads. It cannot add meaning that is missing from the content, and it cannot fix a form with no labels or a button with no name. Around a fifth of US accessibility lawsuits in the first half of 2025 targeted sites that already had one installed. Fix the source.
How much does accessibility add to a web project?
Very little if it is a requirement from the start: contrast is a palette decision, labels are one attribute, alt text is a content field. Retrofitting after launch is where the cost lives, because every screen has to be reopened. Put it in the brief.