The Web Got Less Accessible in 2026. Here's What Four Years of WebAIM Data Mean for React Devs

For six years the web was slowly getting more accessible. In 2026 it stopped. Every February, WebAIM runs an automated accessibility check on the home pages of the top one million websites. The 2026 run found detectable WCAG 2 failures on 95.9% of them, up from 94.8% a year earlier. The average page now has 56.1 detectable errors, up 10.1% from 51. While writing my thesis on accessibility tooling for React, I went through the WebAIM reports from 2023 to 2025. When the 2026 report came out, I added it to the dataset. Here's what four years of data say, and what they mean if you ship React. Four years in one table Metric 2023 2024 2025 2026 Home pages with detected WCAG failures 96.3% 95.9% 94.8% 95.9% Average detected errors per page 50.0 56.8 51.0 56.1 Average elements per home page 1,050 1,173 1,257 1,437 Two things stand out. First, the failure rate barely moves. In four years it went from 96.3% to 95.9%. Almost every popular site still fails an automate