ScanAble Research

The 2026 State of Web Accessibility: We scanned the world's most-visited sites

Published · Data refreshed

We ran an automated WCAG 2.0/2.1/2.2 AA audit against the top 500 most-visited websites in the world (as ranked by Tranco). Of those, 296 scanned successfully — 201 blocked us at the network layer or failed to render, which is itself one of the more interesting findings: top sites increasingly treat headless browsers as adversarial traffic, and that has implications for any team trying to monitor accessibility from a CI pipeline. Here’s what the audit-able subset says about the state of web accessibility going into the back half of 2026.

Average score

42.5

Median score

36.5

% scoring below 70

78%

Worse than expected

% with a critical issue

44%

The headline

Of the top sites that let us in, the average compliance score is 42.5 out of 100, and 44% ship at least one critical accessibility violation — the kind that blocks a screen-reader user from completing a basic action like submitting a form or following a link with no accessible name.

78% score below 70, the threshold a site needs to clear before any meaningful share of WCAG Level AA rules pass cleanly.

The same handful of issues account for the bulk of the failure. Three rules — color-contrast (40% of sites), region (38%), and landmark-one-main (28%) — show up on the majority of audits we ran.

Score distribution

Where the world’s top sites land

90-100
27 (9%)
70-89
38 (13%)
50-69
44 (15%)
30-49
79 (27%)
0-29
108 (36%)
The repeat offenders

Top 10 violations across the audit set

These are the axe-core rules that fail on the largest share of sites we scanned. The first column is the rule ID; the percentage is the share of audited sites that failed it at least once.

RuleSeverity% of sites failing
color-contrast

Ensure the contrast between foreground and background colors meets WCAG 2 AA minimum contrast ratio thresholds

serious40%
region

Ensure all page content is contained by landmarks

moderate38%
landmark-one-main

Ensure the document has a main landmark

moderate28%
link-name

Ensure links have discernible text

serious25%
image-alt

Ensure <img> elements have alternative text or a role of none or presentation

critical20%
heading-order

Ensure the order of headings is semantically correct

moderate19%
page-has-heading-one

Ensure that the page, or at least one of its frames contains a level-one heading

moderate18%
html-has-lang

Ensure every HTML document has a lang attribute

serious17%
target-size

Ensure touch targets have sufficient size and space

serious14%
landmark-unique

Ensure landmarks are unique

moderate14%

Violations by severity

Across all 296 successfully-scanned sites, the scanner counted 11,936 total violations. The breakdown:

Critical

1,279

Serious

4,878

Moderate

5,441

Minor

338

That’s an average of 40.3 violations per site.

What it means for ADA & EAA compliance

The ADA Title II rule for state and local government websites took effect April 24, 2026, and the European Accessibility Act has been enforceable across the EU since June 28, 2025. Together, those two regimes cover most public-facing commercial and government websites used by Americans and Europeans — and the data above suggests the bar is being widely missed.

The pattern in the top-10 violations is consistent: nothing exotic, nothing that requires a deep accessibility specialist to identify. They’re entry-level WCAG 2.0 rules from over a decade ago. That’s either reassuring (the fixes are well-understood) or alarming (the same gaps have persisted for ten years), depending on how charitable you feel.

We’d argue the harder problem is workflow, not knowledge. Most teams don’t have an automated check that runs on every deploy, and most don’t commission an audit until a demand letter shows up. The point of the $49 ScanAble report is to take the procurement-review-style audit out of the critical path: a single URL and ten minutes is enough to know where you stand.

Methodology

How we generated these numbers

  • Source list: the top 500 domains from the Tranco ranked list of most-visited sites.
  • What we scanned: the homepage of each domain (https://<domain>/), loaded in headless Chrome via Puppeteer.
  • Engine: axe-core with WCAG 2.0, 2.1, and 2.2 Level AA tags enabled. Same engine ScanAble uses for every paid audit.
  • Score formula: passes / (passes + Σ(violation_nodes × severity_weight)) × 100. Full breakdown at /methodology.
  • Caveat: automated tools (including ours) catch ~30–40% of WCAG issues per Deque’s research. The numbers above are a floor, not a ceiling — manual testing would surface more.
  • Data file: regenerated by scripts/analyze-domain-scans.ts. The article reads app/research/data/state-of-web-accessibility.json at build time, so re-running the batch and re-deploying updates these numbers in place.

Find out where your site lands

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