The WebAIM report says accessibility is getting worse
Video transcript
Our video on WebAIM's 2025 report showed the web kept repeating the same six accessibility failures.
WebAIM's 2026 is, and there's no good way to describe it, it's worse. The same six failures are still there, but the numbers are larger.
In this year's report WebAIM detected an average of 56.1 errors per page, and 95.9% of home pages had detectable WCAG 2 failures. That reverses the small improvement we'd seen in the previous few years.
If you're thinking this all sounds incredibly familiar, you'd be right. 96% of all detected errors came from just six issues. We're talking low contrast text, missing image alt text, missing form labels, empty links, empty buttons and missing document language. The same six defects as last year, and to make the matters worse, the numbers of errors have increased.
Only missing ALT text and missing language improved slightly, everything else didn't. Low colour contrast went from 79.1% to 83.9%, missing form labels went from 48.2 to 51%, empty links from 45.4% to 46.3% and empty buttons from 29.6% to 30.6%.
Web pages are getting more complex. This year's results showed ARIA usage rising sharply with 82.7% of pages using ARIA and pages with ARIA showing more detected errors.
This rising complexity, heavier ARIA use and maybe AI-assisted generation appear to not just be nudging but actively dragging digital accessibility backwards.
And could the worst trend in software development, vibe coding, be affecting things? WebAIM seem to think it's having an effect, and I agree.
Generative AI has made it easier for anyone to create digital content.
But that also means good accessibility support has decreased. Accessibility requirements need to be communicated clearly and tested effectively. If someone creating a website doesn't know accessibility then why expect AI to generate anything even close to being usable for people with disabilities?
The fact is accessibility is getting worse in 2026 and improving it at scale requires better practices and simpler systems.
But the challenge is not shortcuts or a “fix it later” mindset, but ongoing governance, testing, accountability, and attention to fundamentals. The boring stuff. Because making accessible digital experience isn't easy and needs skills, far beyond the current capabilities of generative AI.
The web is still failing accessibility at scale, because the same few basic errors keep being repeated across increasingly complex homepages.
We’re still losing on the basics, every day.
But it isn’t all doom and gloom, at CANAXESS we put time and effort into making accessibility a sustainable and tangible outcome for businesses.
If you're interested in learning more, drop us a message in the link below, and of course if you want to stay up to date with the latest accessibility trends and understand WCAG better make sure you've clicked like on this video and subscribed to the channel for more videos.
I've dropped several more links in the description below talking about the latest WebAIM report, it's interesting reading if not a little sobering reading. But until next time, thanks for watching and bye for now.