WebAIM Million 2026 is out!

Once again, we got some accessibility data to go through. And once again, the results are quite disappointing.

The number of errors has once again gone up. 95.9% of home pages have accessibility errors. This number is higher than last year of 94.8%, which makes it so much sadder.

All of the issues mentioned in the Million report are found with automated tools. So there are likely many more errors on the pages than just these.

Most common errors

All the most common errors are still the same as they have been in previous years:

1. Low contrast text
2. Missing alt text
3. Missing labels
4. Empty links
5. Empty buttons
6. Missing language

When looking at the graphs about these errors, only missing alt text and missing language have gone down a bit. The others have gotten worse.

While sometimes the low contrast text can be a false positive, the fact that it's so prevalent on the home pages is scary.

ARIA

Use of ARIA has increased quite a bit from last year. According to the report, there are over 133 per page on average. That is a huge amount of ARIA. ARIA code increased 27% in a year.

The use of ARIA doesn't automatically mean more errors; it can also mean that the homepages are more complex. But based on my experience with ARIA use, it's unfortunately quite likely that there are a lot of errors in ARIA use.

## Be careful when vibe coding
There is quite a lot of AI coding going on right now, and I'm not saying it's all bad. I use AI as well. But we cannot trust that the AI tools will create accessible implementations.

Just these few last things I've created have had accessibility issues in the original code that the tool provided.

AI is not smart, and it doesn't know accessibility. So we need to be careful and do more thorough testing to ensure we create accessible solutions.

Start monitoring your content

If all site owners used an automated tool to monitor their sites and fix the issues, all of these could be fixed. Most of these errors are small to fix.

We will never be perfect, and there will always be errors and mistakes, but I don't like that we do systematically inaccessible things. So, could we start monitoring our sites this year and get started on improving the content online? There are so many tools available that there is really no excuse not to do it. The free tools will require you to do more manual work, while the paid tools can usually lessen the manual work.

We, as content creators and service providers, have a responsibility to do everything we can to make things accessible. Let's do our part to make next year's report even a bit better again!

Take a look at the Million report; even though it's sad, the content is still really interesting. And the possibility of searching for domains is helpful. I occasionally report back to my clients if their position in the listing changes in a positive way or if there are new content-related errors. It's always nice to be able to tell a client that their efforts are showing.