Web accessibility seems like it's picking up pace, according to the 2025 Web Almanac.
This is partly because features originally designed for people with disabilities, like captions and voice controls, are now mainstream tech that everyone uses. It's also partly because the way we build for the web, thinking of CMSs and web frameworks, have started baking some accessibility in to take some load off the authors.
New laws are forcing the issue too. The EU's accessibility deadline hit in June 2025 and US government sites now have to meet stricter standards as required by Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). These regulations actually have enforcement behind them, which is pushing accessibility forward.
The data however shows modest progress.
The median Lighthouse accessibility score improved by 1% from 2024. That's steady improvement since 2019. But there's a catch. Automated testing tools can only detect less than half of accessibility problems. So even a perfect score doesn't mean a site is fully accessible.
When you read 1%, you go "pfff!" And with good reason. It's easy to dismiss such a tiny improvement.
But consider that the report is based on analysing 17.2 million websites and processing 244 TB of open-source data. Suddenly, 1% is huge.
We should also take numbers with a grain of salt. Manual testing, user research with people who have disabilities, and accessibility audits by humans remain essential. These are harder to track at scale though. This matters because it means the scores we're celebrating are incomplete pictures.
Nevertheless, when we look at the specific improvements, some patterns emerge.
- Only about 31% of mobile sites meet minimum WCAG color contrast requirements
- 21% of desktop sites still restrict zoom or scaling
- About 14% of sites do not declare a page language
- 67% of sites now override or remove default browser focus outlines
- Over half of inputs on both desktop and mobile rely solely on placeholder text for naming
- Roughly 8.5% of alt texts are just filenames
- 41% of sites use an incorrect heading hierarchy
These are all things that any automated tool would catch and any self-respecting accessibility practitioner would flag in no time. This leads me to believe that despite the tooling, despite all legal pressure, despite all the talk around the importance of accessibility, product teams still decide not to care.
It's not all bad though. Some things are getting better. Things like using ARIA and tabindex responsibly or having document titles. And although 2% of sites use an overlay, the rate is a lot lower among the high-traffic sites.
I'll pick some of the areas that mattered to me while I was writing the accessibility chapter of the Web Almanac and dissect them a bit more starting next week.
By the way, you can read the entire chapter online now.