The 2022 WebAim Million Report
WebAim (Web Accessibility in Mind) is a nonprofit organization that focuses on Web accessibility. They have tools like a color contrast checker, Chrome extension, provide courses and more.
What is the 2022 WebAim Million Report
Over 2022 WebAim tested the accessibility of the top one million homepages through the WAVE stand-alone API. This group of websites consists of domains from the Majestic Millions list, the Alexa top 1,000,000 websites, and the DomCop top 10 million domains.
Findings
It is especially interesting to read through the entire report. It contains nice details where exactly many or fewer errors occur such as frameworks, branches or, for example, in which languages.
Summary
The number of accessibility errors has decreased by about 1.1% since February 2021. This is very minimal, especially when you look at where most of the pain points are.
Most common issues
You would think that the most common errors would not show up in a automated scan. Unfortunately, the opposite is true. Low color contrast, missing alt text and empty links are still common problems.
Skip link
I also found the research on skip links striking. 14% of the websites had these, but in 1 out of 11 this link did not work.
Webshops
Another striking point, which did not surprise me that much, is that web shops are one of the worst performing categories. Forms and especially checkout processes are often complex, especially in terms of accessibility.
The category webshops is one of the worst performing categories
On the contrary, the checkout process is the place of a webshop to make conversions. Therefore, I do not understand why webshops are so bad at this. You would think that webshops want every visitor to be able to convert as easily as possible?
Governments
The best performing category is government agencies. This makes sense because here the WCAG 2.0 standard is mandatory, at least in the United States and Europe. Hopefully the European Accessibility Act that will be active in 2025 will bring some improvement in accessibility scores.