Global Accessibility Awareness Day

Today (May 21) is Global Accessibility Awareness Day, intended to increase the awareness of accessibility issues among Web developers and other technology professionals. Here in Colorado, many of us have been thinking about accessibility a lot since the 2021 enactment of a technology accessibility law that mandated compliance with WCAG 2.1. Since then Colorado government agencies have made great improvements to the accessibility of their websites. A 2024 Web Almanac survey of websites rated Colorado’s state government sites as the nation’s most accessible, with an average accessibility score of 96 out of 100.

But there is still a great deal to do, in this state and beyond. WebAIM, a non-profit accessibility services firm, has been tracking accessibility issues on the home pages of the 1 million most-visited websites since 2019. In their 2026 survey they found that “Across the one million home pages, 56,114,377 distinct accessibility errors were detected—an average of 56.1 errors per page. The number of detected errors increased 10.1% since the 2025 analysis which found 51 errors/page” (emphasis in the original).

The types of errors found will probably be familiar to anyone who works with Web content: 83.9% of home pages surveyed had low contrast text; 53.1% had missing alternative text for images; 51% had missing form input labels; 46.3% had links with no accessible text; 30.6% had buttons with no accessible text; and 13.5% were missing the document language information. Together these six types of errors constituted 96% of all the errors found.

So, although it might be disheartening that there hasn’t been more progress on the Web in general, if Web developers and content creators would pay more attention to just these six types of errors it could dramatically improve the accessibility of the Web.