WebAIM ran its annual scan of the top million home pages, and 95.9% of them have detectable failures against the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). Last year it was 94.8%. The average page now has 56.1 errors, up 10.1% from 51, after years of slow improvement.
The number I keep looking at is a different one. The average home page now has 1,437 elements, up 14.3% in a year, and nearly double what it had seven years ago. Errors rose about as fast as markup did. The same five failures lead the list as always: low contrast text on 83.9% of pages, missing alt text on 53.1%, missing form labels on 51%, empty links on 46.3%, and empty buttons on 30.6%.
My read is that accessibility regressions are mostly a side effect of shipping more interface. Every new element is a new chance to miss a label. An audit catches the result, once, after the fact.
I think the fix is upstream of the audit. A component library where the button cannot be empty and the input cannot lack a label makes the common failures impossible rather than merely detectable. And a budget on how much a page is allowed to grow does the rest, because fewer elements means fewer places to be wrong.
What is the one accessibility failure your component library makes impossible?
Photo source: https://photos.robertstowe.com/bermuda