Why 94.8% of Homepages Still Have Serious Accessibility Issues

Spring is approaching, which means I'm already thinking about what I'll plant this year. Will the tomatoes do better in a different spot? Should I finally try growing peppers? As I sketch out my garden plan, it hits me: accessibility is a lot like gardening.

A thriving garden needs both the right tools and skilled cultivation. You can install the best irrigation system money can buy, but without someone to prune, fertilize, and watch for pests, your garden won't flourish. On the flip side, even the most dedicated gardener can't manually water hundreds of plants efficiently without help.

Yet when it comes to digital accessibility (ensuring people with disabilities can access and use web content), most organizations are trying to solve the problem with one or the other. They either deploy an automated tool and hope for the best, or they commission expensive manual audits that are outdated the moment the website changes.

Neither approach is working. And the data proves it.

The Stagnation Problem

According to WebAIM's annual accessibility analysis(opens in a new tab), the percentage of home pages with detectable accessibility failures has barely budged over the past 5-7 years. In their 2025 analysis, 94.8% of home pages had detectable WCAG failures — down just 3 percentage points from 97.8% in 2019. Despite increased awareness, mounting legal pressure, and billions spent on accessibility solutions, the web isn't getting meaningfully more accessible.

According to AudioEye's Digital Accessibility Index, the average web page still contains 297 accessibility issues(opens in a new tab). That's not a typo: 297 issues per page.

Why hasn't the needle moved? Because we're facing a scale problem that current approaches weren't designed to solve. When most accessibility testing and remediation approaches were developed a decade ago, the internet was a fundamentally different place. Websites were simpler, updated less frequently, and digital ecosystems were more contained. Today's web is exponentially larger, changes constantly, and sprawls across platforms in ways that traditional accessibility approaches simply can't keep pace with.

Why Scale Makes Everything Harder

Three compounding challenges are making accessibility harder to manage than ever before:

First, the internet is growing exponentially. New pages, features, and platforms launch daily. Digital ecosystems sprawl across main websites, microsites, mobile apps, and third-party integrations. By the time you finish auditing one corner of your digital presence, three new ones have appeared.

Second, websites never stop changing. Code updates, content refreshes, CMS migrations. Like a growing garden, your site is a living thing. What's compliant today can break with tomorrow's product launch. Traditional point-in-time audits are snapshots that expire the moment your site evolves.

Third, resources remain constrained. Development teams are overloaded. Budgets are tight. Accessibility expertise is scarce. And accessibility is competing with dozens of other priorities for attention.

So how do organizations solve accessibility at this scale? Most choose one of two paths.

The Two Paths (and Their Limitations)

Path 1: Technology 

The promise of automated accessibility tools is appealing, and for good reason. The best platforms can scan at scale, automatically detect common issues, apply fixes in real time, and continuously monitor as your site evolves. For organizations managing hundreds or thousands of pages, automation isn't just convenient; it's essential.

The reality is more complicated.

Not all automated tools are created equal. Recent research(opens in a new tab) from Adience found dramatic differences in detection capabilities across leading accessibility tools, with some unable to detect even half of what the most comprehensive tools identified. Among automation tools, detection capabilities vary by as much as 500%.

But there's a subset of automated tools that deserve special scrutiny: overlay toolbars and widgets. These products sometimes promise full compliance. In practice, they tend to detect the fewest issues of any automated solution while making the boldest claims, a combination that has drawn criticism from disability advocates and legal experts alike. For organizations relying on them, the risk isn't just that issues go undetected. It's that they have a false sense of compliance. 

Path 2: Consulting & Manual Audits

Manual audits, conducted by certified professionals who test with assistive technology, understand real user experience and identify the high-risk barriers that actually get companies sued. And the best experts don't just hand you a list of fixes. They help organizations address issues at the source, building workflows and sustainable processes so that improvements carry forward dynamically rather than requiring constant rework.

But even this approach has a ceiling.

The challenge isn't quality. Its capacity. There simply aren't enough qualified accessibility professionals, in-house or contractual, to keep pace with the scale of today's digital landscape. Manual audits are slow and expensive by nature, and even when experts help build scalable solutions at the source, those processes still require ongoing human oversight that most organizations can't sustain. Implementation requires significant developer time, creating bottlenecks that stall accessibility programs the moment dev teams get pulled in other directions.

Most importantly, expert-led programs can't keep pace with the speed of digital business on their own. You can't re-audit your entire site every time you update content, launch a campaign, or roll out a new feature.

The problem: Most organizations pick one path or the other and wonder why they're still exposed to legal risk.

The Hybrid Model: Cultivating Accessibility at Scale

Just as the most productive gardens combine efficient irrigation systems with skilled gardeners who understand what each plant needs, digital accessibility requires the same balanced approach. You need technology to handle the scale and human expertise to address the complexity.

A hybrid model combines automated technology for breadth with expert human review for depth:

Automation handles volume. Continuous automated scanning across all pages detects issues in real-time, fixes common barriers instantly, and monitors your site as it changes. This prevents regressions and often catches problems before they become lawsuits. Automation gives you the scale to protect hundreds or thousands of pages simultaneously.

Expert review handles complexity. Certified accessibility professionals, including people with disabilities, focus on the barriers that automation can't reliably detect: the nuanced, high-risk issues that cause lawsuits. They test with real assistive technology, validate that automated fixes are working correctly, and create custom solutions for complex user flows like checkout processes or multi-step forms.

What makes this model work over time is that it doesn't treat accessibility as a project with a finish line. Because automation runs continuously and expert review adapts alongside it, the system evolves as your site does. New issues get caught and prioritized before they become exposure. Protection doesn't expire the moment your site changes.

This isn't theoretical. The regulatory landscape is making this approach essential. With ADA Title II regulations(opens in a new tab) expanding to state and local government websites in April 2026 and the European Accessibility Act(opens in a new tab) already in effect, the global implications are clear: the "wait and see" approach is over.

What This Means for Leaders

Choosing the right accessibility solution is only part of the equation. How your organization builds and maintains that capability over time is what determines whether it holds up. When evaluating accessibility solutions, leaders should ask:

• What percentage of issues can your automation actually detect and fix?

• How do you validate your detection accuracy?

• What happens when my site changes tomorrow?

• Who shows up when I get a demand letter?

The answers reveal whether a vendor is selling tools, services, or an actual solution that scales.

The best gardeners aren't just people who own good tools. They're people with green thumbs: an intuitive, practiced understanding of what a healthy garden needs at every stage of growth. Digital accessibility works the same way. The organizations that build lasting programs are the ones that pair the right technology with genuine human expertise, not just as a service they buy once, but as a capability they develop over time.

As you plan for spring, whether that's your garden or your accessibility roadmap, the lesson is the same: sustainable growth requires combining the efficiency of the right technology with the insight that only human expertise can provide. Neither works well in isolation, but together, and embedded into how your organization builds and ships, they create something that can truly thrive at scale.