Web Accessibility Statistics 2026: Error Rates, Lawsuit Counts and the Revised Public-Sector Deadline

You're in a budget meeting, someone asks for one accessibility number, and the figure on your slide is two years old. That is the usual problem with web accessibility statistics: they keep circulating after the survey, the rule or the court count behind them has changed. Below are the current figures, each with its population, period and primary source, and a flag on the ones that are dated or easy to misread.

The short answer: among the top one million home pages WebAIM scanned in February 2026, 95.9% had at least one automatically detected WCAG 2 failure, and the average page had 56.1 detected errors, up from 51 a year earlier. Three collectors counted between 3,117 and 4,928 US website accessibility lawsuits for 2025, depending on scope. And the compliance dates for public-sector web and mobile-app requirements moved in April 2026.

Key web accessibility statistics for 2026

• 95.9% of home pages had detected WCAG 2 failures, up from 94.8% a year earlier. Population: top 1,000,000 home pages; period: February 2026; source: WebAIM Million 2026; evidence: automated scan.

• 56.1 detected errors per home page, up 10.1% from 51. Same population and source; period: February 2026 vs. February 2025.

• 1,437 mean page elements per home page, up 14.3% in one year. Same population and source; period: February 2026.

• Six failure types made up 96% of all detected errors. This is a share of errors, not of pages. Same population, source and period.

• 83.9% of home pages had detected low-contrast text, up from 79.1%. Same population, source and period.

• 1.3 billion people, about 16% of the world's population, experience significant disability. WHO estimate, from the fact sheet dated 7 March 2023: WHO, .

• More than 1 in 4 US adults, over 70 million people, reported having a disability. Self-reported; US adults; 2022 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System data; source: CDC newsroom release, 16 July 2024.

• 3,117 federal court website accessibility suits in 2025, up 27% on 2024. Federal courts only; source: Seyfarth Shaw analysis, republished on JD Supra; evidence: the firm's own keyword search of court news, which may miss cases.

• 3,948 ADA website lawsuits identified for 2025, up 23.84% from 3,188. Website only; identified through PACER, CourtLink and state court portals; source: EcomBack 2025 annual report.

• 4,928 website, app and video accessibility lawsuits in 2025. Federal courts plus state courts in New York and California; source: UsableNet lawsuit tracker.

• 983 of EcomBack's 3,948 identified 2025 suits (24.90%) involved a website with an accessibility widget present, up from 22.65% in 2024. Source: EcomBack 2025 annual report.

• Public-sector compliance dates moved by one year. Entities serving 50,000 or more people now face 26 April 2027, not 24 April 2026. Source: Federal Register interim final rule, 20 April 2026.

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The error rate went up, and page complexity went up with it

WebAIM's benchmark scanned the home pages of the top one million websites in February 2026. Of those pages, 95.9% had at least one automatically detected WCAG 2 failure, against 94.8% in the 2025 scan. The mean number of detected errors per home page rose from 51 to 56.1, a 10.1% increase. Across the million pages, WebAIM counted 56,114,377 distinct errors.

The pages themselves got heavier. Mean page elements per home page reached 1,437 in February 2026, up 14.3% in a year, and WebAIM reports that page complexity is correlated with error counts. More elements mean more places for a mistake, so the complexity figure is the likeliest mechanism behind the error figure rather than a separate finding.

Read the benchmark for what it is. It measures failures software can detect in the rendered home page, and WebAIM states that full WCAG 2 A/AA conformance was "certainly lower than 4.1%" because only automatable failures were counted. The figures describe the sampled home pages, not every page on those sites. They also come from one publisher using one method, so there is no second automated series to check them against.

The six failures that account for 96% of errors

The same six failure types have dominated WebAIM's findings for seven years running, and together they account for 96% of detected errors. The percentages below are shares of pages. They can't be added to each other or to the 96%, which is a share of errors.

Low contrast is the largest single driver of the rise. Pages with detected low-contrast text went from 79.1% to 83.9%, and the mean number of distinct sub-AA contrast instances per home page was 34, up 15% year over year (same million pages, February 2026).

The list resembles a different, independent measurement. In the UK government's monitoring programme, covered below, colour contrast, absent visible focus, keyboard operability and reflow were the leading issue classes. The two use different methods, so the overlap is a pattern, not a replication.

Where errors concentrate: top-level domains and categories

WebAIM publishes two separate breakdowns that answer different questions.

By top-level domain, .gov home pages averaged 18.5 detected errors (n = 1,987), 67.1% below the 56.1 mean. .edu home pages averaged 23.0 (n = 3,174), 59.0% below it. These are the lowest two among the select TLDs WebAIM displays, not proven to be the lowest of the 1,016 TLDs in the sample. A .gov or .edu domain is not the whole government or education sector, so quote the TLD, not "government sites" or "universities".

By WebAIM's own site category, government home pages averaged 42.4 detected errors (24.4% below the mean) and non-profit and charity pages 43.0 (23.3% below). Shopping averaged 71.0 and sports 71.4, the highest in the table. Category and TLD are different populations, so label each separately.

Neither breakdown explains its gap. WebAIM identifies no intervention, control group or enforcement level for these sites, so the differences are observed means.

Who is affected: population context, dated

Two population figures often sit beside error rates. They count people with disabilities, not people who meet inaccessible websites.

The WHO fact sheet, dated 7 March 2023, estimates that 1.3 billion people, about 16% of the world's population, experience significant disability. It is three years old, so date it every time you quote it.

The US figure comes from the 2022 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System. CDC's release of 16 July 2024 reports that more than one in four US adults, over 70 million people, self-reported a disability. CDC's infographic page is dated 5 May 2026, but that is a publication date. The measurement year is 2022.

Litigation: three counts, three scopes

Three commercial collectors publish counts of US website accessibility lawsuits. Each counts something different, so the figures are not directly comparable and shouldn't be added. Each is also a vendor in the accessibility market, so cite each for its own count only.

A filed lawsuit is an allegation, not a ruling that a site failed to comply. None of the counts is a national census: UsableNet's total covers the courts it tracks, and EcomBack acknowledges that state-court filings are hard to capture completely.

EcomBack's website-only series shows the trajectory. Identified filings were 132 in 2016, 814 in 2017, 2,314 in 2018, 2,890 in 2019, 3,503 in 2020 and 4,055 in 2021. They peaked at 4,334 in 2022, fell to 3,862 in 2023 and 3,188 in 2024, then rose to 3,948 in 2025. These are calendar-year counts.

Within EcomBack's 2025 count, filings clustered in a few places and hands:

• By state: New York 1,108 (28.06%), Florida 950 (24.06%), California 787 (19.93%) and Illinois 576 (14.59%). Illinois rose from 92 filings in 2024 to 576, the largest single contribution to the national increase, while New York fell from 1,600 to 1,108.

• By plaintiff: 251 plaintiffs filed the 3,948 suits. Thirty-three filed 50.10% of them, and 16 plaintiff firms filed 90.35%. The two largest firms filed 641 (16.24%) and 615 (15.58%).

• By industry: restaurants, food and drink accounted for 1,368 suits (34.65%) and lifestyle, fashion and apparel for 1,025 (25.96%). The top nine industries accounted for 91.51%.

UsableNet's monthly tracker gives the latest figure: 360 new ADA web accessibility lawsuits in September 2026, and 78 of the defendants had already faced a prior digital accessibility suit. One counts lawsuits and the other counts defendants, and a defendant can be named in several suits, so you can't turn them into a repeat-filing rate. UsableNet also reports that 36% of companies sued in the first half of 2025 had annual revenue above $25 million, up from 33% in 2024. It does not report the remaining share.

The widget figure needs the most care. EcomBack's 983 suits involving widget-equipped sites are 24.90% of its 2025 count, and the five most common widget vendors accounted for 869 of them. Separately, 91 of the 360 defendants in UsableNet's September 2026 tracker were using a third-party accessibility widget when they were sued. A widget's presence did not guarantee a site would avoid a suit. Beyond that, the data is silent: neither collector publishes how many sites use widgets overall, so no risk rate can be computed, and no ruling on whether a widget works is cited. What you can say is that a substantial and rising share of the identified suits involved sites with a widget installed.

The 2026 deadline changed, but the obligation did not

In April 2024 the US Department of Justice adopted rules requiring state and local governments to make web content and mobile apps accessible under Title II of the ADA. The technical standard is WCAG 2.1 Level AA, per the DOJ fact sheet. In April 2026 an interim final rule extended the compliance dates.

The Federal Register text sets the new dates. For public entities with a total population of 50,000 or more, the date moves from 24 April 2026 to 26 April 2027. For smaller entities and special district governments, it moves from 26 April 2027 to 26 April 2028. The rule was published and took effect on 20 April 2026, with comments due 22 June 2026.

Coverage includes mobile apps, including apps an entity provides "directly or through contractual, licensing, or other arrangements". That wording reaches apps a private company runs on a government's behalf. The DOJ fact sheet says state and local governments' mobile apps "usually" need to meet WCAG 2.1 AA, and the rule carries exceptions for undue burden and fundamental alteration.

The extension moves the formal dates and nothing else. The rule states: "Regardless of the compliance dates, covered entities have an ongoing obligation to ensure that their services, programs, and activities offered using web content and mobile apps are accessible to individuals with disabilities in accordance with their existing obligations under title II of the ADA."

The 2027 and 2028 dates are deadlines. They are not forecasts, and they say nothing about current conformance.

What these statistics do not measure

Each limit below is a fact about the evidence, and each changes how you can use a figure.

Automated benchmarks see part of the problem. WebAIM's figures count failures software can detect. No source cited here measures the share of real barriers that automation misses, so any percentage attached to that claim is unsupported.

Home pages are not whole websites. The million-page benchmark samples the top-level page of each site. Deep pages, checkout flows and logged-in areas are outside it.

WebAIM supplies most of the web-condition figures here. One automated benchmark, one methodology, home pages only. The UK programme below is the independent check.

Mobile apps are the thinnest part of the record. The closest public measurement is the UK Government Digital Service's monitoring programme, published 17 December 2024. It audited 1,203 public sector websites and 21 mobile apps against WCAG A/AA between January 2022 and September 2024, and found accessibility issues on nearly all of them. Of 29,787 issues, 16,482 (55.3%) were fixed during monitoring and 3,693 (12.4%) were still unfixed at retest. After the usual 12-week window, 68% of bodies had fixed issues or had short-term plans, against 59% in the previous period. The testing was manual, against all relevant success criteria, which is why its overlap with WebAIM's automated findings carries weight.

Academic work exists but is not a baseline. The A11yArgus team evaluated its Android accessibility tool on 200 apps from F-Droid and APKPure, according to its CHASE 2026 abstract. The abstract's results describe that tool's performance. They don't show what share of barriers automation can detect, and app-level prevalence can't be checked from an abstract.

The gap, at the width the evidence supports: no representative, repeated measurement of WCAG conformance in US state and local government mobile apps was found. Those apps are the population the Title II rule binds in 2027 and 2028. The UK runs a monitoring programme for that kind of population. The US has a rule and a deadline and no published measurement to track progress against them. This is a gap in the public record, not a finding about all mobile apps: 21 UK apps and a 200-app Android study are small, purposive samples, and neither is a repeated population sample.

No first-party Quash data covers this question. Quash has published no accessibility conformance figures, and this article contains none. Any claim about how common these failures are in mobile apps needs data that doesn't yet exist in public.

What would settle it is a prospective study. It would need a defined sampling frame of state and local government apps on both iOS and Android, named app versions and screens, a fixed WCAG version and success-criteria set, manual testing with assistive technology alongside automated checks, a published method for apps that can't be obtained, and a stated date. The UK programme shows a public body can run and publish that kind of work. If you're planning your own mobile checks, Quash's accessibility testing guide covers what to test on iOS and Android.

What screen-reader users say about mobile

WebAIM's Screen Reader User Survey #11 ran in July and August 2026 and received 1,780 valid responses. The sample was not controlled and may not represent all screen-reader users. Two of its results bear on mobile:

• 1,613 of 1,757 answering respondents used a screen reader on a mobile device. This measures mobile use, not primary device.

• 945 of 1,724 answering respondents (54.8%) said they would most likely use a mobile app rather than a website for common tasks such as banking or shopping. This is a stated preference. It says nothing about how accessible those apps are.

The denominators differ because not everyone answered every question. Quote each with its own.

Methodology and how to cite these figures

Which collector counts what. WebAIM counts automatically detected WCAG 2 failures on the home pages of the top one million sites. EcomBack counts ADA website suits it identified through PACER, CourtLink and state portals. UsableNet counts federal cases and state cases in New York and California across website, app and video complaints. Seyfarth counts federal website suits found through its keyword search of court news.

Why February 2026 is "2026". WebAIM's benchmark is an annual scan, and the 2026 edition reports the February 2026 sample, not the full year.

Why 2025 litigation is not a 2026 total. The litigation counts above cover calendar 2025. UsableNet's monthly figure covers September 2026 only. Neither is a full-year 2026 total.

Why some figures are older. The WHO estimate is a 2023 fact sheet, and the US disability prevalence rests on 2022 survey data. Date both in any sentence that uses them.

Citing these figures. Keep metric, population, period, source and evidence type together. Don't merge the TLD and category breakdowns, don't compute a repeat-defendant rate from the lawsuit counts, and don't treat a filed suit as a finding of non-compliance. Check the rule's legal status again before you quote the 2027 and 2028 dates in a compliance document.

Conclusion

If you need one current figure for a deck, use WebAIM's 95.9% of home pages with detected failures and name the population and the month. If you need a figure about legal exposure, show the three litigation counts with their scopes side by side and don't add them. If you run accessibility for a public body, the date that matters is the one that applies to your population, and the duty already in force isn't extended.

Before you reuse any number from this page, check its date. Where the record is thin, as it is for US public-sector mobile apps, say so in your own material and name the source year you rely on.