WebAIM's Million 2025 is out!

Once again we get the chance to dig into some accessibility data.

There is no change in the most common errors

Once again the top errors remain the same:

• Low contrast text
• Missing alternative text
• Missing form labels
• Empty links
• Empty buttons
• Missing document language

The error percentage did go down a bit again this year, which is good. But missing alternative text, empty links and empty buttons are all a bit higher than last year.

Home pages are getting more complicated

They did notice that the complexity of the home pages has gone up again, and this likely explains some of the errors as well.

I know a lot of home pages have all sorts of content listings. But these elements aren't all that complex so I'm at least hoping that the errors aren't in the listings. Unless, of course, the listings use card elements where the images lack alternative text (as well as the empty alt tag) and are lacking in contrast. There probably are some sites that have these problems, but it cannot be all of them.

The use of regions has increased

At least one region was now on 80 % of the home pages, which is about a 4 % increase. And the use of the search landmark also increased slightly. This reminds me, I need to check my clients' sites for the use of the landmark!

ARIA use has increased a lot again

The graph that shows how many ARIA attributes there are per home page is a bit alarming. While many functionalities require ARIA, there are a lot that really don't. It would be interesting to me to hear if there is some data on the type of ARIA used and how much of it could be left out nowadays.

Once again I can only recommend avoiding any unnecessary ARIA and always checking the ARIA spec before adding any ARIA. And last but not least, always test all ARIA with at least one screen reader.

Ambiguous link text increased

Unfortunately, we saw an increase in meaningless link texts, such as "click here", "more" and "continue". Why are we still adding so many of these? I know that excellent link texts aren't always easy but these can be avoided.

Skip links are still problematic

The number of skip links on home pages increased slightly, but we are still under 15 %.

One out of ten skip links are broken in some way.

The use of tables is going down

One nice thing to read was that the use of tables is not as common this year. Well, this year there were almost 973 000 tables compared to 1 130 000... so there are still a lot of tables. Out of these, less than 20% had valid data table markup.

I would be curious to learn how many of these actually have tabular data in them. In my experience, a lot of people still use tables to visually place content.

Use accessibility tools to catch these errors

The sad thing about these errors is that they can easily be caught with automation. Well, even the Million uses an automated tool (WAVE) to check for these.

There are a lot of free and paid tools available, there really is no excuse to not use a tool to find the errors.

If you have a site that has over 100 pages, I do think that you really cannot do proper quality monitoring without a fully automated tool.