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WebAIM Million Report 2023

In March, WebAIM published their annual accessibility report. A number of well-informed folks have read the report and written articles with their key takeaways.

Manuel Matuzović picks up on one figure in his post, “50.1% empty links“. The number of websites containing links with no text (usually when linking an image that lacks alt text) has risen by 0.4%. He tests out various screen readers on an ’empty link image’ and documents the result, which is universally garbage, albeit with some differences.

Manuel concludes that you should “test your sites at least with an automatic testing tool like axe, Lighthouse, or Wave, and label linked graphics. I’ve described several ways in “Buttons and the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon.”“.

In “We need accessibility action“, Eric Eggert goes deeper. He notes that WebAIM’s tests are all automated (and test home pages only), so show us trends but only find a subset of accessibility barriers. Highlights:

• Average errors per page went slightly down (to 50). 96.3% of all pages have easily detectable WCAG failures – this is down 1.5% in four years.
• ARIA usage has increased a lot, and “pages that use ARIA are more likely to be inaccessible”.
• 96.1% of all errors are in one or more of the following categories:
  • Low contrast text
  • Missing alternative text for images
  • Empty links
  • Missing form input labels
  • Empty buttons
  • Missing document language
• As noted on the report itself, “Addressing just these few types of issues would significantly improve accessibility across the web.”

Eric finds these figures “embarrassing”. These WCAG requirements are not new – they’ve “all been around since WCAG 1.0” which is now 24 years old. For 96% of websites to still have issues underlines the need for “better strategies to educate people about the issues”.

Eric suggests that browsers themselves could fix some issues – “a ramp built into a train will generally be more available than a situation where every stop needs to provide its own”. Mitigation for low contrast text could be built into the browser, for example.

Other errors, like empty links and lack of alt text, really require developer intervention – and Eric argues that such errors should be highlighted in the browser’s console error messages. “There is no reason why JavaScript programming errors trigger messages, and accessibility issues do not. Tooling is bizarrely oblivious to accessibility.”

As for ARIA: “essential ARIA functionality must be transferred into HTML. ARIA needs to be a specialist tool that you only get out if you don’t have any other options. Many of the ARIA techniques are very intricate and for 90% of developers they should never be exposed to that kind of complexity and power.”

Eric concludes that the release of WCAG 3 won’t necessarily help. We have standards already, and people are unable or unwilling to follow them. “In the best case, web accessibility will drag on. In the worst case, we will have multiple standards to follow that have entirely unique ideas of how to test and measure accessibility”.

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