By Chris Winter and Herb Miller. 22 June 2026.
The mission of the WebAIM (Web Accessibility in Mind) organisation ‘is to expand the potential of the web for people with disabilities’. WebAIM is a non-profit organisation based at Utah State University. WebAIM was formed in 1999.
WebAIM conduct an annual accessibility evaluation of the top 1,000,000 websites (home pages). The first of these evaluations was performed in 2019. The 2026 evaluation being the eighth. These evaluations are performed using the WebAIM WAVE Standalone API and Testing Engine.
The 2026 WebAIM Million report is an excellent bellwether on the accessibility of the web. The 2026 report identified that accessibility, as measured by the percentage of home pages with detectable errors, had worsened. 95.9% of home pages had detected Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2 failures.
| Year | Average number of detectable errors | Percentage of home pages with detected WCAG 2 failures |
| 2026 | 56.1 | 95.9% |
| 2025 | 51.0 | 94.8% |
| 2024 | 56.8 | 95.9% |
| 2023 | 50.0 | 96.3% |
| 2022 | 50.8 | 96.8% |
| 2021 | 51.4 | 97.4% |
| 2020 | 60.9 | 98.1% |
| 2019 | 59.6 | 97.8% |
This year’s numbers recorded by the WebAIM Million reports indicates that accessibility has regressed to the 2024 reported status. This backward step is worrying but the overall accessibility of the web and the marginal improvements since 2019 prove that the accessibility of the web remains unacceptable.
As readers of our previous blogs will know, in recent months we have been focussing our attention on the accessibility of WordPress Content Management System (CMS) websites. Our focus on WordPress resulting from its outstanding success. WordPress powers 42.5% of all websites globally. Available data indicates up to 605 million websites run on WordPress. WordPress holds a 59.9% share of the CMS market. WordPress was detected in 252,302 of the top one million home pages evaluated in the 2026 WebAIM Million report. This is an increase from the 241,401 WordPress home pages detected in 2025, an increase of 4.5%. These numbers are very impressive.
The following table details the relevant numbers of WordPress websites evaluated in the WebAIM Million reports 2025 and 2026. The final two columns were captured by WebAIM during the production of their WebAIM reports but previously unpublished.
| Year
|
Number of WordPress home pages in WebAIM Million | Number of WordPress home pages percentage year on year increase | Total number of WordPress errors | Percentage increase detected in WordPress errors year on year | Total number of detected errors in all of the one million pages evaluated | Total number detected errors year on year percentage increase for the one million pages evaluated |
| 2025 | 241,401 | – | 12,073,321 | – | 50,960,285 | – |
| 2026 | 252,302 | 4.5% | 13,330,842 | 10.4% | 56,114,377 | 10.1% |
The above table illustrates that the number of accessibility errors on WordPress home pages has worsened year on year is worse than the top one million homepages as a whole, 10.4% vs 10.1%.
A deeper analysis was performed on the five websites with the most errors at the time of the WebAIM Million evaluation.
| Anonymous home pages | Total WCAG errors detected during WebAIM Million | Low contrast errors detected during WebAIM Million | Total WCAG errors detected June 2026 | Low contrast errors detected June 2026 |
| 1 | 24,019 | 24,012 | Site not found | – |
| 2 | 18,093 | 17,444 | 852 | 830 |
| 3 |
15,744 |
15,491 |
18,320 |
17,833 |
| 4 |
11,424 |
11,377 |
11,750 |
11,726 |
| 5 |
8,778 |
8,710 |
Site not found |
– |
| Totals |
78,058 |
77,043 |
– |
– |
Based on these numbers the accessibility of WebAIM home pages is worsening Year on Year. The numbers indicate that the main issue is low contrast. Low contrast errors are the most prolific of all errors detected in the WebAIM Million Report. The number of errors on a single page is daunting, the question is why?
Conclusions
The popularity of WordPress continues to grow with it being used by over 25% of the top one million websites. However, the average number of accessibility errors of the WordPress home pages evaluated has worsened significantly.
Low Contrast errors are consistently the most common type of WCAG encountered as reported in all WebAIM Million reports to date (2019 – 2026) regardless of the technology used.
The WordPress block editor contains an in-built low contrast checker. However, it is possible to set the colours for a website outside of the WordPress environment and the contrast is not detectable by the editor.
It is believed that the main reason for the worsening accessibility of websites using WordPress is due to the ignorance of the need for accessible websites and / or those users that become aware choose to ignore the need.
Next Steps
We will continue to work with the WordPress Accessibility team on how to raise awareness with its users.
About the authors
Chris Winter FIET FBCS CITP is a former IBM Fellow, now retired. He is now an evangelist for digital accessibility.
Herb Miller is a User Interface specialist with more than 40 years of experience, mainly with IBM.
Herb has been a WordPress specialist since retiring from IBM 16 years ago. Primarily a plugin and theme developer.