For many organisations the conversation around accessibility shows up as a single line in a tender document: “the website must meet accessibility standards”.
Someone knows it is important and asks for that to be included as a requirement. Usually that’s because the organisation needs to follow government or industry guidelines. Worst-case scenario, AI said it was relevant.
But nobody is entirely sure what it means, or what would be involved in finding out. So it gets passed on to whoever ends up building the site, and dealt with somewhere near the end of the project. And that’s the problem. Not the standard itself, but where it sits in the process.
Accessibility gets treated as a compliance exercise, something to be checked off before launch, or just to tick a box. But in reality it should not be treated as a separate piece of work. In fact, it’s the same work that makes a website faster, clearer and easier to use. For everyone, not just for the people the guidelines were written for.
Most website fail this, including the good ones
Every year, WebAIM runs an automated scan across the home pages of the top one million websites (The WebAIM Million). And while the web is moving at a speed never seen before, unfortunately, the 2026 results weren’t good. 95.9% of home pages had detectable WCAG failures, a decrease compared to previous years and reversing six years of gradual improvement. Similarly, the average page had 56.1 errors, a 10.1% increase on 2025.
But the more useful finding is what those failures actually are. The same six issues have been in the top for seven consecutive years: low contrast text, missing alt text on images, empty links, missing form labels, empty buttons and missing document language.
And these aren’t particularly difficult problems. We’re talking about contrast, alt text, labels, buttons and basic page structure. Things that should already be part of building a decent website.
But more importantly, these are also not just accessibility problems.
Low contrast text is unreadable on a phone when you are outside looking for lunch. An unlabelled form field becomes confusing when you are filling it in on a small screen. Vague link text makes links on a page harder to scan when you’re in a hurry and not sure if you are downloading a file, opening a page or simply “learning more”. Broken heading structure makes content harder to follow, and naturally more difficult for search engines to interpret.
Every one of those six failures makes the website worse for people who have no disability at all. They just fail more severely for those who do.
This isn’t a minority issue
There’s an assumption that accessibility work on websites benefits a small, specific group of users. It doesn’t.
The W3C, the organisation that writes the standards, is explicit about who else benefits (W3C):
- People using phones, smart watches and other small screens.
- Older people whose vision, hearing and abilities are changing.
- People with temporary limitations, like a broken arm or a lost pair of glasses.
- People in situations where they can’t hear audio (office environment), or where bright sunlight makes a screen hard to read.
- People on slow connections or limited data.
That’s most of us, most of your clients. That’s everyone.
But naturally there is a big focus on people with disabilities. The ABS found that 21.4% of Australians live with disability, up from 17.7% in 2018. For Australians over 65, it’s 52.3%. (ABS)
But the point isn’t the statistics. It’s that the benefits are available and affect every single user:
- Better contrast helps someone with low vision and someone reading their phone outside.
- Captions help someone who is deaf and someone watching a video on mute in an open-plan office.
- Clear form labels help a screen reader and a person filling in a form at the end of a long day.
You don’t have to choose which group you’re building for. The work and effort is the same.
AI is making this worse, not better
Similar to the AI Flyer Pandemic, you’ve probably noticed that AI-generated websites tend to look the same. The same layouts, the same section order, the same slightly generic feel. Everything is competent, and everything looks like everything else.
And that’s just the visible part. The part underneath is more of a problem (at least for now).
Going back to the WebAIM report, they have put the 2026 regression down to two things: pages getting more complex, and more reliance on frameworks, libraries and AI-assisted code. The average home page now has 22.5% more elements than it did a year earlier. More code, more components, more places for things to go wrong.
And it makes sense when you think how AI tools have been trained. These tools learned from websites where, in most cases, accessibility and compliance wasn’t even considered. So it is natural for AI to reproduce what they were trained on, including the mistakes. You get a site that looks finished, but has the same gaps than any other website out there.
The government has already worked this out
The Australian Government has a Digital Service Standard that sets out how its digital services should be designed and delivered. And even it you are not a government agency, it is worth knowing and use it as a benchmark. At the end of the day, the audience that government is considering is the same you are looking to attract.
One of its items on their document is called “leave no one behind” (criterion 3) which focuses on understanding the audience and using all mechanism to ensure they can use the platform.
While the standard focuses on government services, there’s a commercial version of this too. The standard describes a good digital service as useful, easy, inclusive, transparent and stable. And ultimately, people who find a website hard to read or hard to submit a form on don’t complain saying it’s inaccessible. They decide it isn’t worth the time and won’t even bother.
Where to start
As most things in life, the good news is that you don’t need to solve all of this at once. Or start a new website project today.
Find out where you stand before your clients start pointing out the issues. There are a few automated scan that take minutes and will catch a good amount of issues. And then human review and testing will probably find the rest.
If you are about to start a new website or think it is time for a “refresh”, put accessibility as part of the conversation. And even, if that’s not the case you can always give your web agency the task to review and start considering this an ongoing practice.
At the end of the day, the site you end up with isn’t only more accessible. It will be faster, clearer, better structured and easier to use.
