Some inaccessibility stats
According to WebAIM’s annual Million Report, a sobering 95.9 per cent of the top one million home‑pages scanned in 2024 still betrayed at least one detectable failure of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) – a figure that, while marginally better than 2023, leaves an ocean of inaccessible content behind it.
Back when I delivered my TED Talk in 2022, the failure rate stood at 97.4 per cent, and in the 2019 baseline study it was 97.8 per cent. In other words, five years of spirited campaigning, headline lawsuits and shiny “awareness days” have produced a net improvement of just 1.9 percentage points. With progress measured in tenths of a per cent, sarcasm feels not only justified but almost mandatory.
Should we be inspired or depressed?
Depressing? Absolutely. A 95 per cent failure rate means millions of disabled users still hit digital brick walls daily, and automated scans only catch the low‑hanging fruit. The true picture is almost certainly worse.
Inspiring? Surprisingly, yes—because that stubborn 1.9 per cent proves two crucial things:
- Improvement is possible: Every fraction of a per cent represents tens of thousands of home‑pages fixed. Somebody, somewhere, made the business case, won the budget and shipped the change.
- The solutions are well‑understood: Most violations—missing alt text, empty links, low‑contrast text—are neither exotic nor expensive to remedy. We’re not waiting for a breakthrough; we’re waiting for commitment.
So the stats can depress and galvanise in equal measure: depressing, because the digital divide remains vast; galvanising, because closing that divide is eminently doable with the tools, talent and guidance we already possess.
Where do we go from here?
- Shift from awareness to accountability. Organisations already “know” accessibility matters; what’s missing is meaningful KPIs and executive ownership.
- Bake it into the process, not retrospectives. Accessibility shouldn’t be the post‑launch tidy‑up—it should sit in design briefs, user stories and CI pipelines.
- Celebrate the boring wins. A colour‑contrast fix won’t trend on LinkedIn, but it might be the difference between “buy now” and “bounce” for a customer using a screen reader.
If the last half‑decade has taught us anything, it’s that incrementalism alone is painfully slow. Let’s treat 95 per cent failure as the emergency it is—and use that uncomfortable statistic as rocket fuel rather than a reason to sigh.
