The 2022 WebAIM Million Report is now available. This annual accessibility analysis of the home pages of the top one million web sites provides insight into the current state of and trends for web accessibility. The report provides details into technical aspects of accessibility and comparisons for many types of home page characteristics, such as by top-level domain, document language, site category/sector, and technologies in use. The WAVE web accessibility testing tool was used to analyze the 1,000,000 home pages.
Here are some interesting and noteworthy items from this year’s analysis:
- The number of detectable accessibility errors was 50.8 on average per home page. This was a minor improvement from 51.4 errors one year ago.
- The number of elements on home page is notably growing, with an increase to 955 elements on average from 887 in 2021. Users with disabilities would expect to encounter detectable errors on 1 in every 19 home page elements.
- 96.8% of home pages had detectable WCAG 2 failures. This was a small improvement from 97.4% in 2021 and 98.1% in 2020.
- Home pages most commonly had low contrast text, missing alternative text, empty links, missing form input labels, empty buttons, and missing document language. 96.5% of all errors detected fall into these six categories.
- 84% of home pages had low contrast text averaging 31.6 instances per home page.
- 23% of images had missing alternative text. Over one third of all images analyzed had detectable accessibility issues.
- 39% of the 4.4 million form inputs detected were not properly labeled.
- The proper use of headings in home pages is increasing over time.
- ARIA usage has nearly doubled in two years, with 75% of home pages utilizing ARIA and an average of 60 ARIA attributes per home page. Home pages with ARIA present averaged 70% more detectable errors (23 additional potential barriers per page) than those without ARIA. An increase in ARIA attributes aligned with an increase in detectable web accessibility errors.
- 86% of home pages had a valid HTML5 doctype. HTML5 pages had nearly double the page elements and 15% more accessibility errors than pages with other doctypes.
- Web site categories that were subject to increased civil rights complaints and lawsuits in recent years were among the most improved.
- There were significant differences in detectable accessibility errors based on top-level domain. For example, .ru (Russia) and .cn (China) home pages had around double the errors as .us (United States) and .ca (Canada) home pages. Similar differences were detected for various page languages.
- The presence of most popular JavaScript frameworks, libraries, and web frameworks corresponded with an increase in detectable errors.
There is much more information and analysis available in the 2022 WebAIM Million Report.
The usage of ARIA on home page is due to using of landmarks and other attributes by the frameworks. We work primarily in WordPress and all the themes use ARIA to mark landmarks and navigational menu widgets.
This data is extremely helpful. Thank you!
It’s interesting how even the big sites don’t really care that much about accessibility. I wonder what the results are for all those smaller sites with not nearly as many resources.
I’d also expect that at least homepages are fine-tuned, especially when it comes to such low-hanging kind of accessibility problems such as missing alt texts or missing form control labels.
Sometimes I wonder about the possibility of a “bad ARIA blocker” in the vein of similar content blockers, like uBlock Origin. Sites flagged for using ARIA poorly could have some content filtered.
Alternatively, something like webcompat.org for a11y issues could also help here.