Website accessibility can feel enormous when you first look into it. There are guidelines with version numbers, conformance levels, legal standards, and a great deal of technical language that is not written for business owners.
Here is the part nobody tells you: it is not actually that many problems.
Analysis of accessibility failures across the web, most recently compiled in 2026, found that six issues account for 96% of everything that goes wrong. Six. Not six hundred.
We are going to walk through all six, tell you how to spot each one on your own website, and be straight with you about which ones you can handle yourself and which ones need a developer.
1. Low Contrast Text, Found on 79.1% of Sites
This is the most common problem on the internet by a wide margin, and it is almost always a design decision rather than a mistake.
Light gray text on a white background. A pale sans-serif over a photograph. White text on a soft pastel. It looks clean and modern, and it is genuinely hard to read for anyone with low vision, anyone over about fifty, and anyone reading on their phone outside.
How to check: WebAIM’s free contrast checker lets you paste in two colors and tells you whether they pass. The standard for normal body text is a contrast ratio of at least 4.5 to 1.
How to fix: darken the text or lighten the background. You usually do not have to abandon your brand palette. Most brands have a darker shade available that keeps the look and clears the standard.
Can you do it yourself? Often yes, if you can edit colors in your site builder.
2. Missing Alternative Text, Found on 55.5% of Sites
Alternative text, usually called alt text, is the written description attached to an image. Screen readers read it aloud. When it is missing, someone using a screen reader hears nothing useful, sometimes just a file name.
Picture a bakery website where every cake photo is unlabeled. Someone using a screen reader hears “IMG_4471 dot jpeg” and moves on.
How to check: in WordPress, open your media library and look for images with an empty alt text field. Most SEO plugins will also flag missing alt text.
How to fix: describe what is in the image and why it is there. “Three-tier white wedding cake with fresh eucalyptus” is useful. “Cake” is not. And if an image is purely decorative, it is fine to mark it as such so screen readers skip it.
Can you do it yourself? Yes. This is the most approachable item on the list, and it helps your SEO too.
3. Missing Form Labels, Found on 48.2% of Sites
Every field in a form needs a label that is connected to it in the code. Not placeholder text that vanishes when you start typing. An actual label.
Without one, a screen reader announces an empty box. The person has no way of knowing whether it wants their name, email, or phone number. If that is your contact form, you have made it impossible for them to reach you.
This is the failure we take most seriously, because it directly blocks someone from becoming your customer.
How to check: unplug your mouse and press Tab through your contact form. If you cannot tell what each field wants from the keyboard alone, there is a problem.
How to fix: add proper labels. Most modern form plugins support this, but the setting is often off by default or the label has been hidden for design reasons.
Can you do it yourself? Sometimes, depending on your form tool. This one often needs a developer.
4. Empty Links, Found on 45.4% of Sites
An empty link is a link with no readable text. Usually it is an icon, a social media symbol, an arrow, a bare image with no description.
A screen reader announces it as “link” with nothing after it. The person has to guess where it goes, or skip it.
How to check: Tab through your site and listen to, or look at, what each link announces. Your header and footer icons are the usual culprits.
How to fix: add hidden descriptive text or an accessible label. “Follow us on Instagram” instead of an unlabeled icon.
Can you do it yourself? Usually not. This one typically needs a developer.
5. Empty Buttons, Found on 29.6% of Sites
Same principle as empty links, and often the same cause. A button styled as an icon with no text inside it. The hamburger menu on mobile. A search icon. A close button on a popup.
The person using a screen reader hears “button” and nothing else.
How to check: look at every button on your site that shows an icon instead of words.
How to fix: add accessible labels so the button announces its purpose.
Can you do it yourself? Usually not. Developer territory.
6. Missing Document Language, Found on 15.8% of Sites
This is the smallest and the easiest. Your site needs one line of code declaring what language it is written in.
Without it, a screen reader may read English text using pronunciation rules for another language. The result is close to unintelligible.
How to check: ask your developer, or view the page source and look for a lang attribute in the opening HTML tag.
How to fix: one line of code. Genuinely a five-minute job.
Can you do it yourself? Probably not, but anyone who touches your site can, and it should take almost no time.
Why This Matters Beyond the Legal Side
We could point you at the lawsuit numbers, and they are real. Federal filings rose 27% in 2025, and most of the businesses sued were not large companies. The trend has been climbing steadily since 2018.
But that is not the best reason to do this.
Around one in four American adults lives with some form of disability. When your website is hard to use, you are not just accepting legal risk. You are quietly turning away customers who wanted to work with you and could not.
And there is a nice side effect. Nearly everything on this list also helps your search visibility. Alt text helps images get found. Proper heading structure helps search engines understand your pages. Good contrast and clear labels reduce the number of people who bounce. Accessible sites tend to be better sites for everyone.
Where to Start
If you only do one thing this week, add alt text to the images on your homepage and your top three pages. It is free, you can do it yourself, and it is the second most common failure on the web.
If you want to know where your whole site stands, that is the kind of thing we can audit. We will tell you what is there, what matters most, and what you can reasonably handle in-house versus what needs a developer. No pressure either way.
Failure rate data from published WCAG analysis of website accessibility errors, reflecting figures available as of October 2026. The six issues described here have remained the dominant failure categories across multiple years of analysis. This article is general guidance on website development, not legal advice.