The internet is failing a basic accessibility check, and it’s getting worse

Every year, WebAIM scans the home pages of the one million most-visited websites and checks them against WCAG, the standard courts and regulators use to define “accessible.” The 2026 results: 95.9% of home pages had at least one detected WCAG failure, up from 94.8% the year before.

The average home page now carries 56.1 detected accessibility errors — up 10.1% from 51 errors in 2025. That’s not a rounding error or a handful of outlier sites dragging the average up. It means the typical business website, including ones built recently by people who cared about design, is quietly failing dozens of accessibility checks at once.

Six mistakes show up almost everywhere

The same handful of issues account for most of the failures, year after year:

Low contrast text — 83.9% of home pages. Light gray text on white backgrounds, pale buttons, subtitle text that looks elegant on a designer’s monitor and is unreadable in sunlight or for anyone with low vision.

Missing alternative text on images — 53.1% of home pages. Photos, icons, and logos with no text description, meaning screen readers either skip them entirely or read out a meaningless filename.

Missing form input labels — 51% of home pages. Contact forms and newsletter signups where a screen reader has no way to tell a visitor what an empty box is actually asking for.

Empty links — 46.3% of home pages. Icon-only links (a social icon, an arrow, a magnifying glass) with no accessible name behind them.

Empty buttons — 30.6% of home pages. Usually a menu toggle or a close icon with nothing announcing what it does.

Missing document language — 13.5% of home pages. A one-line fix that tells browsers and screen readers what language to render the page in, and over one in ten sites still skip it.

None of these require a redesign. They’re the kind of thing that gets missed when a site is built fast and never audited — which describes most small business websites.

This isn’t just a big-company problem anymore

More than 5,000 digital accessibility lawsuits were filed in 2025 — over 3,100 in federal court and roughly 1,900 more in state courts, concentrated in New York and California. And the businesses actually getting sued skew smaller than most owners assume: 64% of defendants were businesses under $25 million in revenue, against 36% for larger companies.

E-commerce sites account for about 70% of all filings, with food service businesses next at roughly 21%. If your site sells anything online or takes reservations or orders, you’re sitting squarely in the group these lawsuits target most.

Almost none of the businesses getting sued ignored accessibility on purpose. They just never had anyone check.

Where the lawsuits are concentrated

Geography matters more than most business owners realize. New York accounts for more than 2,500 filings — over a third of all state-level cases nationwide — making it by far the most active jurisdiction. Florida isn’t far behind, running 80 to 110 new filings a month throughout 2025. Pennsylvania, Minnesota, and Missouri have all seen filing activity grow as firms that specialize in these cases look for less crowded courts.

If your business serves customers in any of these states, or you’re incorporated there, that’s worth knowing before it becomes relevant the hard way.

What it actually costs to settle

Typical settlements for ADA website cases fall in the $5,000 to $20,000 range, and small businesses often settle for $10,000 or less, even against firms based in New York. The number that catches people off guard isn’t the settlement itself — it’s the non-monetary terms that frequently come with it: mandatory accessibility audits (sometimes quarterly), user testing requirements, and remediation work, often overseen by a third-party consultant the business is required to hire. Those ongoing obligations can end up costing more than the original settlement.

None of this is legal advice — if you’ve received a demand letter or are already facing a claim, talk to a lawyer who handles ADA Title III cases before you do anything else. What follows is the practical, non-legal side: the same checks that would have prevented most of these cases from having grounds to begin with.

The fixes are mostly not hard

Match each item below against the six failures above, and most small business sites can close the gap in a day or two of focused work, not a redesign:

Contrast. Body text and buttons should meet a 4.5:1 contrast ratio against their background. Free contrast checkers will tell you exactly which colors on your site fail.

Alt text. Every meaningful image gets a short, specific description. Purely decorative images get marked as decorative so screen readers skip them on purpose.

Labeled forms. Every input — name, email, message — needs a real, programmatically connected label, not just placeholder text that disappears the moment someone starts typing.

Descriptive links and buttons. Icon-only links and buttons need an accessible name (a screen-reader-only label works fine) describing what they actually do.

Page language. One attribute in your site’s code, set once, covers this permanently.

If you don’t know whether your own site has these issues, that’s the actual finding of this article: on the numbers above, it’s more likely than not that it does. We run an accessibility pass as part of every build we deliver, and you’re welcome to book a free audit call if you want a straight answer on where yours stands.