Popular Websites Fail Accessibility Checks More Often Than Small Sites: 65.7% vs 60.2%

A customer with low vision opens a local bakery's website on her phone to order a birthday cake. The menu text is pale gray on white, the photos have no descriptions for her screen reader, and the order form fields have no names. She gives up and calls a competitor, and the bakery never learns why.

Website accessibility means building pages that people with disabilities can use: text dark enough to read, images described for screen readers, forms whose fields say what they want. The same fixes help everyone else too: darker text is easier to read on a phone in sunlight, and labeled forms are quicker to fill in.

Big budgets do not buy accessibility by default. 65.7% of the 10,000 most visited websites fail Google's accessibility test, against 60.2% of small business websites. Neither group does well: 94.8% of all homepages fail at least one automated check.

We used the September 2026 HTTP Archive, a public dataset that tests millions of websites every month, and took every mobile homepage that had been through Google's Lighthouse accessibility test: 14,717,394 homepages. Lighthouse is Google's free website testing tool, built into the Chrome browser. Its accessibility test runs automated checks such as color contrast, image alt text, form labels and link names, and gives each page a score from 0 to 100. A score of 90 or more is a pass.

We grouped homepages by popularity using Google's Chrome UX Report: the 10,000 most visited websites, websites ranked 10,000 to 1 million, and websites outside the top million, where most small and local business websites sit. For each group we counted homepages scoring below 90 and below 100, and averaged the score.

That runs against the assumption that big sites do better. The 10,000 most visited websites fail 65.7% of the time, and websites ranked between 10,000 and 1 million fail most often, at 67.7%. The average score tells the same story: small business websites average 84.8 out of 100, ahead of the top 10,000 at 83.2 and the middle group at 83.

One likely factor is that busier websites carry more images, menus, pop-ups and third-party widgets, and every extra element is another chance to fail a check. A small business homepage with a logo, a few photos and a contact form has fewer places for problems to hide. That does not make small sites accessible: six in ten still fail.

A score of 90 counts as a pass, but a page can score 90 and still have failures a visitor will hit. Only about one homepage in twenty clears every automated check and scores 100. The rate is almost identical in every group: 93.5% of the top 10,000 websites fail at least one check, 95.2% of websites ranked 10,000 to 1 million, and 94.8% of small business websites.

Most of these failures repeat across every page, because they come from the site template: the same pale footer text, the same unlabeled search box, the same logo image with no description. Fixing the template once clears the problem on every page that uses it.

68.6% of website homepages have text with too little contrast against its background, making it the most common accessibility failure, more than twice as common as images with no alt text, the written description a screen reader reads aloud, at 26.2%. Contrast problems come from design choices such as light gray body text or white text on pale photos, so they are fixed in the colors a site uses, not by a plugin.

On contrast, small business websites do worse than the most visited ones: 68.8% fail, against 62.5% of the top 10,000. A small business site usually takes its colors from a template, and nobody checks them against the contrast standard once the brand colors are dropped in.

Run Google's Lighthouse test on your own homepage: open it in Chrome, right-click, choose Inspect and run the accessibility report. It takes under a minute. If you score below 90 you are in the majority, and the fixes behind most failures are small: darker text colors, alt text on images, labels on form fields and link text that says where the link goes.

Do not assume your web designer or platform handled this; the most visited websites fail just as often. Ask for an accessibility check as part of any redesign, and test again after new content goes live. A website accessibility consultant can go beyond the automated test to check keyboard use and screen reader behavior, the problems machines cannot measure.

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