In which we look at the depressing state of the web.

This article originally appeared in the fortnightly Inclusive by Design newsletter, a 5-minute piece of thoughtful and actionable advice on accessible and inclusive practices that I ran between June 2019 and May 2020.

Why websites are getting worse instead of better

293 words about professional — 07:00 · 7th Apr 2020

Today’s piece will be short and more of a question to you than anything else.

A question, because I’m not entirely sure about the answer.

Last year, WebAIM conducted an accessibility analysis of the top 1,000,000 home pages.

Their results were, from my point-of-view, incredibly disappointing.

Not only is the web inaccessible, the ~30% of issues we can test for automatically, are such easily fixable problems that it felt like a punch to the gut.

Last week, they updated their analysis, having run it again and were now being able to compare the results from the year before.

A small part of me was hoping we would see an improvement because accessibility and inclusion has been a more prominent subject of conversation in the last year.

A bigger part of me worried that we wouldn’t see any improvements at all.

Frankie's experiments have gone all wrong and has exploded in their face whilst they stand surrounded by items that reference all the previous articles. Illustration by Carlos Eriksson.
The results were incredibly disappointing.

I’ve now read it, and for today, I’d like you to read The WebAIM Million too.

Or at least try to.

Because their conclusion is simple: Websites are getting worse, instead of better.

Update 24 Jan 2023. Over the last 4 years, the pages with detectable WCAG failures has decreased by only 1.5% from 97.8%.

And my question to you is, “Why?”

Why do you think websites are getting worse instead of better?

In return, I’m here for all the questions you have after having read the analysis.

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In which, 4 years ago, I wrote 293 words about professional and I covered topics, such as: accessibility , inclusive design , and superdupercritical .