The Web Has an Accessibility Problem. Most People Don't Know It Yet.

I spend most of my work week thinking about accessibility. I work on a university web platform with over a thousand content editors, and a big part of my job is learning what WCAG 2.2 AA actually requires and trying to apply it thoughtfully across a really complex system.

I want to be honest about that word "learning." I've never navigated the web with a screen reader. I don't know firsthand what it feels like to hit a broken form label or a link that goes nowhere descriptive. What I have is a growing respect for how much I don't know, a lot of research, and a genuine desire to do this well. Accessibility standards exist because disabled people and advocates spent years pushing for them. Those standards are still evolving. I'm trying to keep up.

What I've noticed lately is how easy it is to forget that this is a niche world.

Most small business owners have never heard of WCAG. They picked a theme, got their site online, and moved on to running their actual business. That's not negligence. That's just how most of the web gets built. So I started looking at some websites I know personally. Shops I've worked at, restaurants I've eaten at. Just to see what the problem looks like outside of a university context.

What I found was clarifying.

One Shopify store had over 200 ARIA attributes on its homepage. ARIA is a specification meant to help assistive technologies navigate complex interfaces, but the general guidance is to use native HTML elements first and only reach for ARIA when nothing else works. 200+ attributes on a small retail homepage isn't a deliberate technical decision. It's a theme doing it automatically, with no one the wiser.

Another Shopify store sells products where the story behind each item is kind of the whole point. Who made it, what it's made of, why it exists. Every product image had missing or generic alt text. For a sighted customer the image communicates all of that. For a screen reader user, or Google trying to index the page, there's nothing there. The thing the store most wants to say, gone.

The third one stuck with me most. A restaurant with a beautiful site, zero errors on an automated scan, and a menu posted entirely as image files. No alt text. A blind customer lands on the page and cannot read the menu. But it's also not just a disability issue. Think about someone searching "best mushroom pizza in Bozeman." Google can surface reviews and tagged photos, but if the restaurant's own website has their funghi pizza locked inside an image file, Google can't confirm it even exists. A competitor with a text-based menu wins that search. Accessible content and discoverable content are often the exact same thing, and this restaurant is missing out on both.

None of these businesses did anything wrong. They trusted the platforms. The platforms mostly hadn't thought it through.

Every year WebAIM audits one million websites. In 2025, 94.8% had detectable WCAG failures. The average page had 51 errors. That number has barely moved since 2019.

What gets me isn't just the scale, it's that six error types account for 96% of all issues. Low contrast text, missing alt text, missing form labels, empty links, empty buttons, missing document language. The web isn't failing in complicated ways. It's failing in the same simple ways, over and over.

So why hasn't it gotten better?

I don't think it's that people don't care. I think accessibility has been framed as a legal liability for so long that people treat it like a checkbox. Something to deal with if a lawyer shows up, not something to build toward. And the platforms that promised "anyone can have a website" quietly left accessibility out of that promise. You get a site that looks great and passes a basic scan and fails real people in ways you'd never catch unless you knew what to look for.

The part that frustrates me most is that the broader case for accessibility almost never gets made. Accessible websites are faster, rank better in search, and work for more people in more situations. Someone on a slow connection, an older device, bright sunlight, one hand full. Good semantic HTML doesn't just help screen reader users. It helps everyone. Building for the people we've historically excluded tends to build something better for all of us.

The European Accessibility Act started enforcement in June 2025. ADA lawsuits in the US are climbing every year. That pressure matters. But regulation tends to produce the minimum viable version of compliance, not genuine care. I'm not sure rules alone close a gap this wide.

Awareness without a path forward doesn't change much. So here are three things any small business can do without hiring a developer or switching platforms.

Run a free audit. Go to wave.webaim.org, drop in your URL, and see what comes back. It won't catch everything (the restaurant above is proof of that) but it surfaces the most common issues immediately and it's free.

Write real alt text. Every image that communicates something should describe what it is and why it matters. Most platforms have an alt text field on every image and most people leave it blank or write "product image." For a decorative image, an empty alt attribute is actually correct. It tells screen readers to skip it. The distinction matters. "Hand-thrown ceramic mug in sage green glaze, made by a Montana ceramicist" is useful. "IMG_4823" is not.

Put your key content in actual HTML.If your menu, your hours, your services, anything essential, lives inside an image file, it is invisible to assistive technologies and largely invisible to search engines. It doesn't have to look different. It just has to be real text.

Once you start seeing this stuff you can't stop seeing it. I'm aware that's its own kind of bubble. But I also think there's something worth doing at the intersection of knowing how this works and knowing how to explain it to someone who doesn't.

I'm still learning. The standards are still evolving. But the gap between what's technically possible and what's actually happening on most websites right now is hard to sit with once you notice it.

These three steps won't get anyone to full compliance. But they'll make a real site more usable for real people. That feels like the right place to start.