94.8% of home pages fail accessibility. The fixes also lift conversion

Every year WebAIM runs an automated accessibility scan across the home pages of the top million websites. The 2025 results: 94.8% of pages had detectable WCAG 2 failures, with an average of 51 errors per page. The number has barely moved in years, which says less about difficulty than about priority.

The case for fixing it is usually made on ethics and law, and both are sound. This post makes a third case, because the three most common failures in WebAIM's data are also three of the most common reasons any visitor, with or without a disability, fails to do what the page wanted them to do.

1. Low-contrast text (79.1% of pages)

Light grey text on white. Placeholder text used as labels. A muted palette that looked refined in the design file. WebAIM found low-contrast text on nearly four in five home pages, making it the most common failure by a wide margin. For a user with low vision it is unreadable. For everyone else it is slower to read, on a phone in daylight it is invisible, and a button whose label cannot be read does not get pressed.

Fix: body text at a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 against its background, large text at 3:1. Check it with a contrast tool, in the design file and again in the browser. Grey text is a style choice; unreadable grey text is a conversion leak.

2. Missing alternative text (55.5% of pages)

Images with no alt attribute, or an alt that says "image". For a screen-reader user the image does not exist. For a search engine the image carries no meaning. For a visitor on a slow connection waiting for a hero image to load, there is no text to tell them what they are waiting for. Product screenshots, feature illustrations and the chart on the pricing page all lose their value when they fail to load or cannot be read.

Fix: every meaningful image gets an alt that says what it shows and why it is there. Decorative images get an empty alt so they are skipped. The writing discipline this imposes, saying in a sentence what the image is for, tends to improve the images.

3. Missing form labels (48.2% of pages)

A field with placeholder text and no label. The placeholder disappears when the user starts typing, so they no longer know what the field was for. A screen reader announces "edit text" with no hint. Autofill cannot match the field. Nearly half of home pages have at least one such field, and sign-up and contact forms are where they live.

Fix: a visible label for every field, associated with it in the markup, and placeholders used only for examples of format. Properly labelled forms get completed more often by everyone, because the user never loses track of what they are filling in, and because the browser can help.

Where to start

Run an automated checker on your home page and your sign-up form. It will find the three failures above in minutes. Fix contrast first, because it is a design-token change that fixes the whole site at once. Then labels on the forms that matter. Then alt text on the images that carry meaning. An afternoon's work, on most sites, and the conversion effect shows up in the forms.