May 16, 2024, marks the 13th celebration of Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD), dedicated to increasing awareness about accessibility and its significant impact on more than one billion people with disabilities worldwide.
There are many events available to attend, both in person and. virtually, check out this list of events.
It is critical that we all expand our awareness and understanding of digital accessibility, this isn't a topic just for social media managers and website designers. We are all responsible for digital accessibility and need to play our role in making the world more accessible. This can be as simple as adding Alt Text on social media posts or checking the colour contrast of the text on the latest notice for the notice board.
I highly recommend taking the free course on Accessibility Fundamentals from Microsoft. It's modular and self-paced, allowing for a flexible learning experience. Take the Microsoft Accessibility Foundations course for free here.
The WebAIM Million report is produced each year by assessing the top million websites for accessibility. The report is a great measure of the progress towards a more accessible web.
95.9% of home pages had detected WCAG 2 failures. This improved slightly from 96.3% in 2023. Over the last 5 years, the pages with detectable WCAG failures have decreased by only 1.9% from 97.8%. These are only automatically detected errors that align with WCAG conformance failures with a high level of reliability which suggests that the rate of full WCAG 2 A/AA conformance was certainly lower.
It's encouraging to observe a decrease in the number of pages not adhering to WCAG standards; however, it's crucial to acknowledge that the average number of failures per page has risen. Remarkably, 96% of these issues are categorized into six main types, all of which can be addressed with relative ease. These failure types are:
| WCAG Failure Type | % of home pages |
|---|---|
| Low contrast text | 81.0% |
| Missing alternative text for images | 54.5% |
| Missing form input labels | 48.6% |
| Empty links | 44.6% |
| Empty buttons | 28.2% |
| Missing document language | 17.1% |
Read the full WebAIM Million report
Visit Where do I start with Accessibility? for a curated list of accessibility resources.
Posts from previous years:
GAAD 2023 - Where do I Start with Accessibility?, Tim Dixon (bbeb.com)
5 ways you can support disability inclusion, Tim Dixon (bbeb.com)
Browsing with Assistive Technology, Tim Dixon (bbeb.com)
Digital accessibility refers to the ability of people with disabilities/impairments to independently consume and/or interact with digital (e.g., web, mobile) applications and content.
unknownx500
/Passle/60211dc9e5416a0c14bc63d4/SearchServiceImages/2025-12-03-19-31-44-490-69309020a71bd983b528ca6c.jpg)
