Rules move, standards get revised, and the research keeps measuring the gap between
what the law expects and what businesses actually ship. We track it here so you do not
have to, and every entry names its source.
Latest
The web got less accessible this year, reversing six years of progress
WebAIM’s annual evaluation of the top one million home pages found detected
WCAG 2 failures on 95.9% of them, up from 94.8% the year before, and the
average page carried 56.1 distinct errors against 51 in 2025. That is a ten
percent increase in twelve months, and it breaks a run of six consecutive years
in which the numbers had been slowly improving. WebAIM attributes much of the
reversal to rising page complexity and to ARIA being applied incorrectly —
which is to say the problem is not that businesses stopped trying, but that the
things they are building have outgrown the care being taken over them.
Research · webaim.org/projects/million
DOJ sets a technical standard for public-entity websites
The Department of Justice published a final rule under ADA Title II adopting
WCAG 2.1 Level AA as the technical standard for the web content and mobile
applications of state and local government entities, with compliance dates phased
by the size of the entity. Title II reaches public bodies rather than the
private businesses covered by Title III, so the rule does not bind a
restaurant or a hotel. Its value elsewhere is evidentiary: when a business argues
that no standard exists to be measured against, this is the federal government
naming one.
Rulemaking · ada.gov
DOJ guidance restates that the ADA applies to the web
ADA.gov published guidance confirming the Department’s longstanding position
that the ADA’s requirements reach the websites of businesses open to the
public, while noting that those businesses retain flexibility in how they comply.
No specific technical standard was adopted for Title III, and that omission
is why careful accessibility work cites WCAG success criteria as the measure
rather than as the rule.
Guidance · ada.gov
How this page is maintained
Entries are added by hand from primary sources and each one names where it came from.
Nothing here will ever assert an unverified claim about a named business.
On a product whose entire value is evidentiary rigor, a single unsourced item costs
more than the page is worth.
Why it matters
The standard is settled. The gap is widening.
WCAG has been published, versioned and freely available for two decades, so the
argument that businesses cannot know what is expected of them has never been weaker.
What the 2026 numbers show is that knowing has not been enough. Sites are failing more
often than they were a year ago, not less, and they are failing on criteria that have
been stable for years. Businesses do not miss these because the requirements are
obscure; they miss them because nobody inside the company was accountable for checking,
and because for a long time nothing followed from not checking.
That last part is the part that changes. Regulatory attention and private enforcement
both alter the calculation, and they are the only two things that reliably do.