The numbers
56.1 accessibility errors per page on average. That’s up 10% from last year. 95.9% of home pages had errors.
Interestingly, the average number of page elements jumped 22.5% in a single year. Pages are now nearly twice as complex as they were in 2019. And as complexity goes up, so do the errors.
96% of all detected errors fall into just six categories: low contrast text, missing alt text, missing form labels, empty links, empty buttons, and missing document language. These have been the same six categories for seven years running. The basics keep getting missed because there are more and more places to miss them.
More ARIA, more problems
ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) is a set of attributes developers add to HTML to make interactive content understandable to assistive technologies. Its usage is up 27% in one year. It’s now six times higher than in 2019. Pages with ARIA have 17 more errors per page than those without.
ARIA isn’t the cause of all those errors, but its use correlates with more complex pages. When developers reach for ARIA instead of semantic HTML, they often introduce the very barriers they were trying to prevent. The first rule of ARIA is still “don’t use ARIA” if native HTML can do the job. A lot of sites are skipping that step.
What you add matters
Nearly every popular JavaScript library WebAIM tested was associated with more errors. jQuery UI, Slick, and FancyBox all saw errors grow. Meanwhile, sites built with Astro averaged just 9 errors per page, 84% below the overall average.
Every carousel, lightbox, and fancy interaction you add to a page is a new place for accessibility to break. That doesn’t mean you can never use them. It means they should be carefully considered.
“If I had more time, I would have built a simpler website”
There’s a quote often attributed to Blaise Pascal: “I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.”
The same idea applies to websites. Building something simple takes more thought, not less. It means choosing a native HTML button instead of a styled div with an ARIA role. It means asking whether a carousel actually helps anyone or just looks good in a pitch deck. It means resisting the third-party widget when a well-structured page would do.
WebAIM’s own conclusion this year: “Improving accessibility at scale will require both better practices and simpler systems.” We see that every time we open an audit spreadsheet.
What you can do
Before adding the next feature, ask whether the page needs it. Use semantic HTML first. Test with a keyboard. If a screen reader can make sense of your page without extra help, you’re probably in good shape.
Simpler is almost always more accessible. The data keeps saying it, and so do we.
Sources
WebAIM: The WebAIM Million, 2026 report on the accessibility of the top 1,000,000 home pages
W3C: Using ARIA, rule 1: if you can use a native HTML element, then do so