Each year, WebAIM releases The WebAIM Million, a report based on scans of the homepages of the top one million websites. It’s an incredibly helpful long-term longitudinal study.
But each year, the accessibility community waits for the results with a familiar sense of tension. The numbers are – let’s face it – consistently poor, even if they do rise a little one year, and dip a little the next. Generally, they report that the typical homepage has 50-60 accessibility errors.
At Evinced, our customers are doing much, much better than that, and that led us to think about how there could be such a difference between what we experience with our customers (who are, on balance, the world’s largest companies) and what WebAIM reports.
Small sites, big problem
Given that our customers are so large – one, in fact, has revenues approaching $1 trillion USD – we immediately thought about the Tranco list.
The Tranco ranking is the list of global websites that the WebAIM Million study analyzes. It’s a research-based way to rank the top 1 million websites every day.
The websites on the top of the list are from big companies, certainly. But the ones on the bottom of the list (as of May 13, 2026) include:
- A five-store retail chain in rural Pennsylvania
- The portfolio website for a graphic designer
- An open-source, donation-only discussion platform built by an admin called “someguy”
- A Kuwaiti site selling action figures
Nothing against small businesses, but accessibility is usually not something you tackle until you have enough extra revenue to hire a consultant to help you with it. And indeed, on the website of the retail chain in Pennsylvania above, a quick run of Evinced Web Flow Analyzer identifies 89 problems on the homepage.
Moreover, it’s known that a small number of large websites have an outsized proportion of internet traffic. A reliable 2019 report found that the top 6 websites accounted for 43% of internet traffic.
Given all this, we’d argue that the long tail of the Tranco list has a tendency to underweight the lived experience of users who rely particularly on proper accessible html, because we know they (like most people) will be spending most of their time, on average, on the most popular websites.
Introducing The Evinced 500
To add color to the existing research situation, we decided to run Evinced tools on the homepages of the 500 websites corresponding to the Fortune 500. (It’s surprisingly easy to do, at scale, with either our Site Scanner or Automation SDK for the Web.)
These enterprises can have dedicated in-house accessibility programs, legal teams concerned with WCAG compliance, and tens of thousands of customers who are likely to notice accessibility problems and escalate them. So we’d expect them to do better than the 56.1 errors per page that is the WebAIM Million average for 2026.
Bigger is better, but not perfect
And indeed they did. Of the sites we scanned, the average number of Evinced-detected issues was nearly 20.
That’s a long way from 56.
But it’s also a long way from perfect. By our analysis, about 90% did have at least one accessibility bug. On the other hand, that does mean that 10% of homepages we scanned had no issues detectable by our Automation SDK. On this Global Accessibility Awareness Day, let’s call this good-ish news.
Industry matters a lot
As an additional analysis, we grouped the Fortune 500 companies by rough industry classifications. Those results were surprising to us, as financial companies were about 3X better than their peers in big tech. Having six of the top 10 financial services companies as customers, we shouldn’t have been surprised, as compliance in heavily regulated businesses is taken quite seriously and accessibility as a function often reports into compliance.
Technology companies were at the opposite end of the range, averaging 26 issues per site, with 98% of tech homepages showing at least one accessibility problem, one of the highest rates. This interpretation is more tentative, but our view is that tech homepages often pursue more ambitious interactive experiences, including complex animations, dynamic rendering, custom components, and aggressive use of JavaScript. More moving parts create more opportunities for things to break. The same sophistication that makes tech sites feel visually advanced can undermine accessibility when it is not built in from the beginning.
The pattern is consistent across every sector we measured: the industries with the strongest compliance cultures have the best accessibility results. The industries building the most complex web experiences often haven’t matched their engineering ambition with an equal investment in accessibility.
| Industry | Homepages Scanned* | % with Issues | Avg Issues/ Homepage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Real Estate | 7 | 71.4% | 4.7 |
| Financials | 75 | 88.0% | 9.1 |
| Utilities | 24 | 75.0% | 10.3 |
| Health Care | 43 | 90.7% | 14.3 |
| Communication Services | 17 | 76.5% | 16.6 |
| Industrials | 81 | 97.5% | 19.8 |
| Materials | 24 | 87.5% | 22.2 |
| Consumer Discretionary | 64 | 89.1% | 25.4 |
| Information Technology | 55 | 98.2% | 26.0 |
| Energy | 28 | 92.9% | 26.6 |
| Consumer Staples | 35 | 91.4% | 29.5 |
Scan date: May 11, 2026
A methodological note
Some readers might wonder if there is some methodological confusion here. For example, WebAIM uses WAVE, a well-known scanning tool focused on a defined set of WCAG failures, including missing alt text, empty links, missing form labels, low contrast, and several other high-confidence structural errors.
If Evinced tools somehow find fewer errors than WAVE, then we couldn’t be certain that larger companies are doing relatively well vs. small companies, as we’ve shown above. The difference, if this were true, would be in the tools themselves.
Fortunately, the opposite is true. We controlled for this by pointing WAVE and Evinced at the same set of sites, and Evinced found up to 3X more errors. That makes sense to us, as Automation SDK for the Web is only one of our tools, and as it is, we capture keyboard accessibility failures, focus management problems, and component-level defects that WAVE (and other static analysis tools) cannot detect. If anything, the Evinced 500 above are passing a harder test.
Where this goes from here
It must be said, homepages are usually the easiest webpages to get right when it comes to accessibility. They are relatively static and heavily reviewed. If accessibility issues appear there, then authenticated product flows, account dashboards, checkout paths, settings pages, and interactive applications are likely to have even more. Those are going to need to get analyzed.
It’s not at all clear to us that manual review processes will be able to do all this heavy lifting on their own. To truly close this gap, companies will need low-friction, high-precision software tools that can make accessibility a seamless part of the development lifecycle.
Depending on the company, all that’s required is a change in attitude and a change in software. The best news for GAAD 2026 is that the software is ready and waiting.
Special thanks to WebAIM for helping us dive deeper into WAVE and The WebAIM Million report.
Note, only 453 of the 500 Fortune 500 websites were scannable due to bot restrictions.