The WebAIM Million project (Web Accessibility in Mind) annually evaluates the accessibility of the top 1,000,000 website home pages on the web.

The 2025 report reveals several critical insights into the current state of web accessibility that we thought we would share with you. Do you make any of these mistakes?

Prevalence of Accessibility Errors

Let’s start by just getting a general picture of how common accessibility issues are.

This years’ report shows an average of 51 distinct accessibility errors were detected per homepage, with over 50 million errors across all sites analysed.

It’s not great, but some perspective is important.

If we compare these stats to last years, there’s been a 10.3% decrease from the previous year’s average of 56.8 errors per page (around 5, per page).

We might not know the cause, but it could well be a combination of developers generally taking accessibility more seriously (we would hope this is true, at least in part) but also AI copilots might well be noticing some of the most obvious - and easiest to fix - errors, and resolving them.

Increasing Page Complexity

The average number of elements per homepage has risen to 1,257, with a 7.1% increase from 1,173 elements in 2024. While more elements on the page might not necessarily equate to more accessibility errors, it’s fair to say that more elements equates to more opportunity to do things incorrectly.

Over the past six years, page complexity has surged by 61%, indicating more intricate web designs (perhaps pushed along by UI libraries that have become increasingly popular, too).

While this might not be an inherent issue, it does suggest we’re generally using more code on our pages, and this often results in more accessibility issues.

Error Density

Most developers like to think they have done all they can to make their websites as accessible as possible. However, the stats suggest that we have a long way to go, and that an average website is likely to have features that are just entirely unusable for those with disabilities.

In fact, approximately 4.1% of all homepage elements contained detectable accessibility errors.

This means users with disabilities are likely to encounter an error in about one out of every 24 elements they engage with.

WCAG Conformance

This one is sobering.

A huge 95.9% of homepages failed to meet Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 Level A/AA standards.

Yes, you read that correctly. Less than 5% of websites actually meet the WCAG guidlines.

While this is a slight (very, very slight) improvement from 96.3% in 2023, it shows quite how widespread accessibility issues are.

Common Accessibility Issues

So which accessibility issues are most common? The list probably won’t surprise you, because it tends to look essentially the same every year.

The most frequent problems include:

• Low contrast text (81% of pages)
• Missing alternative text for images (54.5%)
• Missing form input labels (48.6%)
• Empty links (44.6%)
• Empty buttons (28.2%)
• Missing document language declarations (17.1%)

These six issues account for 96.4% of detected errors, so if you can tidy these up you’re going to make a huge improvement to your projects.

Impact of ARIA Usage

The application of Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA) attributes has quadrupled since 2019, averaging 89 attributes per page.

However, pages using ARIA averaged 34.2% more detected errors than those without, suggesting potential misapplications of ARIA roles and properties.

This is an interesting one, because it’s likely you feel that by including ARIA’s you are making your website more accessibility, but if you don’t get it right, it’s actually working against you (or more importantly, your users).

Sector Performance

Websites in the government and education sectors generally exhibited fewer accessibility errors compared to other categories of website.

This isn’t much of a surprise, as government organisations or public sector bodies often have stricter accessibility regulations and policies governing them, but it’s still a shame to see that private sector does not take it as seriously.

Conclusion

There have been modest improvements in certain areas, but it’s important to recognise that for decades now, we’ve seen the same common accessibility issues featured in these kinds of reports.

What can be done to encourage - or incentivise - developers to take accessibility more seriously? We’d love to hear your ideas on socials.

Now that you’ve got a handle on the state of accessibility on the web, go and make your own projects more accessible today.

Addressing these prevalent issues, particularly the six most common errors, could significantly improve web accessibility for users with disabilities.