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August 26, 2026

Brand, Law, and Reality: The State of Web Accessibility

By: Clint Godlesky – Director, Technology & Innovation

Accessibility is one of the most consistently mishandled aspects of building a website, and the data show it’s getting worse, not better. WebAIM’s latest scan of the top million homepages found 95.9% still fail basic WCAG checks, up from 94.8% the year before. That reverses six straight years of slow improvement. This piece connects those numbers to the legal exposure and real-world consequences behind them.

12 minutes

Brand, Law, and Reality: The State of Web Accessibility Thumbnail

Digital accessibility was once only a best practice. Yet today, in the United States and much of Europe, it is an enforceable civil rights law. Courts have repeatedly interpreted the Americans with Disabilities Act to apply to commercial websites, and regulators increasingly reference WCAG 2.x AA as the technical standard for compliance.

And yet, the web remains overwhelmingly non-compliant. WebAIM’s Million Report finds that 95.9% of the top one million homepages contain detectable WCAG failures. All of these accessibility failures are foundational and repeated at scale, and the 95.9% reveals these are systemic habits.

95.9%

2024 report

94.8%

2025 report

95.9%

2026 report

Digging into the data

WebAIM’s 2026 Million Report analyzed the home pages of the top one million websites and found that 95.9% contain detectable WCAG 2 failures. The average homepage contains 56.1 accessibility errors. That’s 56 opportunities to fail a user. After years of advances in tooling, legal pressure, and industry awareness, the baseline remains effectively unchanged year after year: nearly every major website fails automated accessibility checks. 

The majority of auto-detected errors fall into these recurring categories:

  • Low-contrast text (present on roughly four out of five homepages)
  • Missing alternative text
  • Missing form labels
  • Empty links and buttons
  • Missing document language declarations

The real numbers are often worse. Automated tools identify only a limited subset of WCAG failures, generally estimated in industry literature to be roughly one-third of total potential issues, because many barriers require human evaluation. If nearly 95.9% of sites fail automated screening, the true rate of non-conformance is almost certainly higher.

See for yourself: Two-minute spot check

Start with the Tab Key test. Pressing Tab should highlight interactive elements throughout the page. As you repeatedly press the key, it should move logically across the page as a person would scroll. If focus disappears, jumps unpredictably, or becomes trapped, you’ve found a keyboard accessibility failure that warrants a closer audit.

Brand: when the palette meets the web

One of the delights of a rebrand is the reveal. The logo has been refreshed, and with it comes a new palette. The colors hit every note. They signal strength, safety, and approachability. The mood boards are stunning. Leadership signs off. Everyone in the room gets excited about the brand.

Then the palette meets the web.

A designer is using a color palette to create a logo, with example color contrast values set off to the right.

For most companies, the website is where the brand lives most of its life. The logo tucks into the header of every page and email, and the colors take over everything else: headlines, buttons, links, body copy. This is where one of the most common and most predictable mistakes happens. The brand team mandates the colors as absolutes. Use this red for CTAs. Use this gray for body text. No exceptions.

The problem is: nobody in that approval meeting ran a contrast check.

The bold, on-brand red that felt commanding in the logo fails WCAG’s 4.5:1 contrast minimum at 16 pixels on a white background. The refined light gray that made the typography feel airy is illegible to a meaningful share of your audience, and it carries real legal exposure. Designers see hue, but the standard measures luminance. This difference is where compliance shatters.

A hue chart showing different color contrast ratio values against a black, white, and grey background.
Hue—gets all the attention.
A luminance chart showing different color contrast ratio values against a black, white, and grey background.
But it’s luminance calling the shots.

The CMO didn’t make a bad call. Nobody imposed luminance constraints on them at the palette stage. The brand was built in one room, and the website in another, and no process connected them. This governance gap is entirely predictable.

This pattern repeats across the industry, and the fix is rarely dramatic. Most of the brand-to-web failures we remediate at Chemistry trace back to the same handful of root causes, and a precise audit surfaces them quickly: which color pairings fail, on which surfaces, and what tonal adjustments bring them into compliance without sacrificing the palette. 

The brand survives. In most cases, it gets stronger because the constraints force clarity about how each color is actually meant to work.

The longer-term answer is to make the audit unnecessary. When accessibility checks are built into the design process itself, contrast failures never reach production. On our own builds, a color-contrast issue hitting QA is rare, not because our designers are more careful, but because the system they work in considers compliant combinations in all design and development work.

That is the difference between treating accessibility as a correction and treating it as a property of the brand system. One of them you pay for repeatedly. The other you build once.

Law: it caught up slowly, then all at once

The ADA was signed in 1990, before the commercial web existed. WCAG followed in 1999. For nearly two decades after, the two barely touched. Businesses argued, often successfully, that the ADA governed physical spaces. A website was not a ramp or a doorway, the reasoning went, so the law did not reach it. Lawsuits were rare, and lost lawsuits rarer.

Assistive technology filled the gap as best it could. Screen readers like JAWS and NVDA, and later Apple’s VoiceOver, built directly into its operating systems and Safari, gave users with impairments a way into the web. But the experience was wildly inconsistent. Markup that read cleanly in one tool repeated itself or fell silent in another. For developers, the inconsistency became its own excuse. If there was no single right answer, why invest in any answer at all?

The courts ended that ambiguity. 

Robles vs. Domino’s

In Robles v. Domino’s, a blind customer sued after the company’s website and app failed to work with his screen reader. The Ninth Circuit ruled against Domino’s, and in 2019, the Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal, leaving the ruling intact. The message to businesses was unambiguous: the ADA reaches your website. 

Gil v. Winn-Dixie

Gil v. Winn-Dixie told a more complicated story. A Florida trial court initially ordered the grocery chain to bring its site into WCAG 2.0 AA conformance, a ruling later reversed on appeal, but by then the precedent-setting damage was done. The initial ruling spurred a wave of ADA website accessibility litigation that has never receded. More than 5,100 suits were filed in 2025 alone, a 20 percent increase over the prior year.

The scales of justice. A blindfolded woman holding up scales.
Justice is blind. Your website shouldn’t be.

What made these cases land was not legal novelty. It was how avoidable the failures were. As design ambition grew, with elaborate menus, parallax effects, and animation-heavy interfaces, the underlying code quietly excluded entire groups of users. A brand could ship a navigation system with dozens of polished transitions, while a keyboard user could not get past the open button. That kind of unfairness invites litigation, and litigation has brought change.

Strip away the legal language, and the logic is plain. A sighted visitor sees a customer enjoying your product. A blind visitor hears “stock image 234 01 v2 dot jpg.” No one needs a law degree to understand why these laws exist.

Why the law matters

The ethical case does not need much dressing up. Roughly one in four American adults lives with a disability. These are customers, employees, and citizens. They are trying to do ordinary things: refill a prescription, compare a price, apply for a job. An inaccessible site does not feel like a design flaw to them. It feels like a locked door. The law exists because the door kept getting locked.

The business damage compounds quietly. Every barrier is an abandoned cart, a bounced session, or a customer who went to the competitor whose site worked. The flip side is that accessibility work overlaps with practices that benefit everyone. Semantic markup helps search engines parse your content. Captions help commuters watch without sound. Sufficient contrast helps anyone read a phone in sunlight. Complaint sites convert better.

Teams rarely regret this work. They regret deferring it until a demand letter forces the schedule.

Reality: what website owners should do now

You reviewed both the brand and the law. Now, as a website owner or manager, decide what steps to take today.

Start with an audit, but know its limits 

Automated scanners are the entry point for most organizations, and for good reason. Errors such as missing alt text, empty links, missing form labels, and unlabeled buttons can be reliably detected at scale with tools. However, automated audits cannot detect issues related to context, content clarity, or keyboard navigation.

Even color contrast, the most automatable check of all, has blind spots. When text is overlaid on an image, a gradient, or a video, most tools cannot compute a meaningful ratio. Industry estimates hold that automated testing surfaces only about a third of WCAG failures. The rest require a human. Someone must listen to the page with a screen reader, or judge whether alt text actually describes the image, not just confirms it exists. An automated scan that comes back clean is a starting line. It is not a finished report.

Be skeptical of overlay widgets

This is also why overlay widgets deserve skepticism. Many products now promise one-line-of-code compliance, and the litigation data tells that story plainly. 

UsableNet tracks whether a sued website was running a widget on the day the lawsuit was filed. It counted just over 250 such companies in 2020. By 2023, it was more than 900. By 2024, the complaints had sharpened: a quarter of all digital accessibility lawsuits cited the widget itself as a barrier rather than a solution. 

An overlay cannot restructure a heading hierarchy or label a form it did not build. Screen reader users say the extra control panels often make navigation worse. In 2025, the Federal Trade Commission ordered a leading vendor to pay $1 million to settle allegations of deceptive advertising. A widget badge on a broken site is not protection.

Enable an ongoing process

The realistic program, then, looks like this. Run automated scans continuously, not just once a year. Pair these with manual and assistive-technology testing for your highest-traffic flows. Fix the foundational errors first, since they dominate every failure report. Then move the fixes upstream into the system. This way, next quarter’s audit validates rather than discovers.

The bottom line   

Your website is your digital employee, working hard to sell your brand, products, and ideas. Like any employee, it needs management and support, and ensuring it delivers to your entire customer base is a great way to enable it. It doesn’t hurt to stop potential ADA lawsuits while doing so.

References

Reports and guidance

Litigation data and enforcement

Regulations

  • Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, 42 U.S.C. § 12101 et seq. (1990). 
  • Nondiscrimination on the Basis of Disability in State and Local Government Services, 28 C.F.R. § 35.200 (2024).
  • Nondiscrimination on the Basis of Disability in Programs or Activities Receiving Federal Financial Assistance, 45 C.F.R. § 84.84 (2024).

Cases

  • National Federation of the Blind v. Target Corp., 452 F. Supp. 2d 946 (N.D. Cal. 2006).
  • Robles v. Domino’s Pizza, LLC, 913 F.3d 898 (9th Cir. 2019), cert. denied, 140 S. Ct. 122 (2019).
  • Gil v. Winn-Dixie Stores, Inc., 257 F. Supp. 3d 1340 (S.D. Fla. 2017), rev’d, 993 F.3d 1266 (11th Cir. 2021), vacated as moot, 21 F.4th 775 (11th Cir. 2021).

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