Most Businesses—Even Big Businesses—Aren’t Meeting Website Accessibility Standards
More businesses seem to have a general awareness of the need for website accessibility in their digital ecosystem. Our agency sees it more often as part of RFQs, audit requests, and generally included within technical or architecture-oriented work over the past couple of years. Keyword popularity and trend reports show that after a surge in popularity in 2022 (due to lawsuits and the DOJ publishing specific web accessibility guidance), interest declined but remained slightly higher than the 2022 surge. Yet, even with increased attention… almost all businesses are failing to meet website accessibility standards.
A prominent study in early 2020 showed over the past year that accessibility errors across top websites had increased by 2%. After increased visibility at that time, errors decreased by 15.6%, and stayed fairly stable over the next two years. But most of that improvement was lost by 2024, which saw another big increase in errors (13.6%). Why, even with increased attention, are companies still struggling to make websites accessible?
Website Accessibility Optimization Roadblocks
Website Accessibility is Usually Retrofitted
Although the U.S. Department of Justice ruled that the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) applies to the internet in 1996, and Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 1.0 were published in 1999, big pushes for web accessibility changes really didn’t hit hyperdrive until 2015, which meant organizations, developers, and marketers already had established websites, established processes, established best practices in place.
Web accessibility to this day tends to be lower on the list of priorities when building or updating a website. That means when organizations decide to focus on accessibility, it’s retrofitted onto existing architecture. Retrofitting means creating workarounds into code that wasn’t designed to have accessibility-oriented features. A site built from the start with accessibility standards in mind is almost always stronger and better performing in terms of accessibility than a retrofitted one.
Website Complexity Keeps Increasing
Along with an increase in accessibility errors, the WebAIM report shows that home pages have seen increasing complexity over the past few years. 2024 saw a complexity increase of 11.8%. Website accessibility error increases went above and beyond this complexity error increase, and 2023 and 2022 saw similar complexity increases without seeing similar accessibility error increases. But it’s an additional barrier that companies must overcome. The difficulty of accessibility improvements does tend to increase as website elements increase and the complexity behind those elements increase as well.
Awareness is Still an Issue
Although we’ve talked a lot about the increasing awareness of website accessibility needs, ADA web accessibility standards, legal requirements, and the details of what a truly accessible website means remains low. We’d love to show detailed surveys and studies about this, but although the amount of information on failing websites is high, the information on knowledge and awareness of website accessibility for website owners and business owners seems to be very low. Getting from the level of “Okay, I generally know website accessibility is important” to “We fully understand website accessibility and are putting the time, effort, and money behind it” is a big hurdle.
Budget Limitations and Expanding Marketing/IT Needs
Rarely is budget not an issue, and it definitely is here. Organizations can implement small accessibility fixes for a fairly small budget, but comprehensive and strategic website accessibility improvements come with a decently sized price tag. Businesses are frequently having to make choices about what makes the budget cut and what doesn’t.
Why Weak Website Accessibility Is a Problem
We’d like to say that the only reason needed is to ensure that people with disabilities have access to websites, but we’ve known this for years and organizations are still not able to prioritize effective solutions. There are additional, business critical reasons to consider.
Poor User Experience
Best case scenario with poor website accessibility—you’re providing a set amount of people a poor user experience. Worst case scenario—you’re providing everyone a less than optimal user experience. Some studies have shown 69% of users have abandoned websites due to lack of accessibility. Frequently, website accessibility improvements help non-disabled people because those improvements tend to be more user-friendly overall. And excellent UX can improve conversion rates by up to 400%.
Loss of Traffic and Limiting User Reach
Unfortunately, we’ve seen comments in UX discussions that make the argument that website accessibility is over-emphasized because most people don’t have a disability. Setting aside the problematic nature of that comment, it’s also just short-sighted. People with disabilities make up a pretty large population in the world, and the percentage is growing.
According to World Health Organization (WHO), there are currently an estimate 1.3 billion people in the world with a significant disability. In the U.S., 1 in 4 people report a disability that impacts major life activities—that’s 61 million Americans. Because people are living longer and because the world has seen an increase in noncommunicable diseases, the percentage of people with disabilities continues to grow. The long and the short of it is—if your website is inaccessible, you’re cutting down your audience reach dramatically.
Organic Search (SEO) Impacts
Google already factors in some areas of accessibility into SEO: metadata, image alt text, heading tag structure are all search engine rankings AND accessibility elements. But so far at least, Google does not have a specific ranking factor for accessibility (although they do show you metrics in the Google Lighthouse tool and PageSpeed Insights).
Yet, accessibility DOES positively improve SEO performance. Likely this is due to how accessibility improves UX, and great UX improves a lot of things that Google does factor into their ranking algorithm such as improved website engagement and lower abandonment. A study by Accessibility Checker, BuiltWith, and SEMRush summarizes that domains that installed accessibility solutions saw an increase in organic search traffic by 12%.
Lawsuits
Website accessibility also means good risk management because it’s the law that businesses provide accessible websites. 4,605 web accessibility lawsuits were filed in 2023, and in general that number has increased significantly year after year. The cost of these lawsuits varies dramatically, but according to some sources, most lawsuits where prompt corrective action was taken had a settlement of under $25,000.
However, some lawsuits cost substantially more, and some are high profile and have a substantial impact on brand authority. You might remember the Domino’s lawsuit that lasted for six years and received substantial attention or the case where Target was required to pay $6 million in damages or the Harvard case where the university was liable for over $1.5 million in attorneys’ costs and fees. Inaccessible websites can be a high risk and high cost problem.
Find Website Accessibility Resolutions that Work for Your Organization
In our next blog, we’ll be looking at how organizations can take action, improve their websites’ accessibility, and keep ahead with accessibility standards moving forward. In the meantime, if you need support for website accessibility, let us know. Cimarron Winter can help you improve your approach and showcase a digital ecosystem that is more accessible and higher performing.