Everyone has the right to access information on the web – including the 1 billion people worldwide who have a disability. Unfortunately, there continue to be barriers that stop people from being able to get to the information they need, despite the fact that the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines have been around for more than 20 years. 
A recent report has found that there’s an average of 59.6 major accessibility errors per webpage. Diamond, a digital agency in the US, has taken the data from WebAIM’s accessibility analysis of the top 1 million home pages and developed a report that looks at the different errors, why they are still happening and what we can do about it.
The report says that the state of accessibility on the web at the moment is not acceptable. Improvements must be made if we are going to give people with disability the same experiences online as everyone else.
Causes of the most common accessibility failures of home pages included:
- 85 per cent with low-contrast text
- 68 per cent missing alternative text for images
- 63 per cent with empty links and buttons
- 53 per cent with missing form input labels
- 33 per cent with missing document language.
To improve these numbers, the report says that:
- lawmakers need to be taught about accessibility
- the laws surrounding accessibility requirements need to be improved
- businesses need to be educated about accessibility laws and how they are not supporting the rights of people with disability
- people who produce digital products need to think about their products with people with disability in mind
- people who produce digital products need to be taught how to create these products with accessibility always in mind.
You can read the full report and what we can do to help improve these results on the Diamond website.
