In February 2019, WebAIM conducted an evaluation of the home pages for the top 1,000,000 web sites using the WAVE stand-alone API (with additional tools to collect site technology parameters). While this research focuses only on automatically detectable issues, the results paint a rather dismal picture of the current state of web accessibility.
Some highlights from the report:
- 98.7% of home pages had a detectable WCAG 2.0 error
- The most common error was low contrast text found on 85.3% of home pages
- Missing alternative text occurred on 68% of home pages.