The web went
backwards

For six years the web slowly got easier to use. This year it reversed. 95.9 percent of the top million home pages now fail basic accessibility, up from 94.8 percent, and the average page throws 56 errors at anyone who cannot use a mouse or read faint text. It got worse in the same twelve months a French court started fining a retailer 500 euros a day for exactly this. Being mostly usable is now a legal fail.

01The web just failed its own exam

Every February, WebAIM runs the same test on the busiest million home pages on the internet. Automated, boring, repeatable. This year 95.9 percent of them failed the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, the basic standard for whether a disabled person can actually use your site. That number went up. It was 94.8 percent last year, and it had crept down a little every year for six years before that. The web had been quietly improving, and this is the year it turned around and walked back.

The average home page now hits a user with 56 separate accessibility errors, up a tenth in a single year. Fewer than 4 sites in 100 pass cleanly. This is not a fringe problem on abandoned pages. These are the front doors of the most visited sites on earth.

02It got worse the year it became the law

Here is the timing that should sting. The European Accessibility Act became enforceable on 28 June 2025. It says that if you sell to people in the EU, your website and your app have to be accessible. Not aspirationally. Legally.

On 4 June 2026 a court in Caen did the thing everyone assumed was still years away. It found Carrefour, one of the biggest retailers in Europe, liable for an online shop and an app that disabled customers could not properly use. It ordered the company to fix both within six months or pay 500 euros for every day it runs late.

The detail that matters for everyone else: Carrefour's site was reportedly already around 71 percent conformant, and the court said that was no defence. Accessibility, the judge held, is an obligation of result. The site either works for the user or it does not. Mostly accessible is a fail. That is the first ruling of its kind to name a retailer and to cover a mobile app, and it will not be the last.

So the web slid backwards in the exact year that being backwards started carrying a daily fine.

03Why it is sliding

The failures are not exotic. WebAIM finds the same boring six every year: text too faint to read, which turns up on 84 percent of pages, images with no description, form fields with no label, links and buttons that announce nothing, and pages that do not even declare what language they are in. Ninety six percent of all the errors are these six. None of them are hard to fix. All of them are easy to ship by accident.

And we are shipping more of them. Pages are heavier than they have ever been, the average home page grew 22 percent in a year, and the code underneath is more tangled. WebAIM points a finger straight at the trend of the moment: AI assisted building, the thing people now call vibe coding. The tools that let anyone spin up a slick site in an afternoon are fluent in markup and careless about the human on the other end. They stack on layers, they pile up ARIA attributes that make things worse rather than better, and nobody checks whether a screen reader can follow the result. Faster to build has quietly meant worse to use.

04What we'd tell you

Do not buy an overlay. The little accessibility widget that promises one line of code will fix everything does not work, disabled users broadly hate it, and it will not save you in court. Accessibility is not a plugin. It is a craft, and mostly it is the basics done on purpose.

Start with the boring six. Get your contrast right. Describe your images. Label your forms. Make every link and button say what it does. Declare your language. That one afternoon of unglamorous work clears the bulk of what WebAIM flags and most of what a regulator would come looking for.

Then treat it as what it actually is, which is design. A site a blind person can navigate is a site a search engine can read, a site that works on a cracked phone in bright sun, a site that still loads for the person on a bad train connection. The floor the law just set is the same floor that good work was always meant to clear. The web went backwards this year. Yours does not have to.