In this episode of Accessibility Craft, the team dives into the newly released WebAIM Million 2026 Report and what it reveals about the current state of web accessibility. From rising error counts to surprising CMS rankings, the conversation explores whether the industry is actually improving and what’s driving the trends. The discussion also connects these insights to Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) and how individuals and organizations can take meaningful action.
Along the way, Amber, Chris, and Steve sample a bold craft beverage: Great Notion Triple Berry Shake, a tart ale packed with berry flavor and a creamy finish that sparks plenty of lively reactions.
Episode Outline
- Beverage review: Great Notion Triple Berry Shake and first impressions
- Overview of the WebAIM Million 2026 Report and key findings
- Why accessibility errors increased after years of improvement
- Most common accessibility failures across top websites
- The role of homepage complexity and design trends like carousels
- CMS comparison: how platforms like WordPress, Wix, and Squarespace stack up
- The impact of open vs closed ecosystems on accessibility outcomes
- JavaScript frameworks discussion, including Astro and modern development approaches
- Introduction to Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD)
- How contributors create real impact in the WordPress ecosystem
- Practical ways anyone can contribute, from the highly technical to the beginner-friendly
- How to pledge for Equalize Digital’s GAAD Contributor Day
Links & Resources Mentioned
- Pledge for Global Accessibility Awareness Day 2026
- Great Notion Triple Berry Shake
- The WebAIM Million 2026
- Amber’s X Post
- Accessibility Pause Animated GIFs on GitHub
- Celebrating GAAD 2025: Community Wins, WordPress Progress, and What’s Next
- Global Accessibility Awareness Day
Tune in to Accessibility Craft conversation episodes like this one every other Monday.
Accessibility Craft is hosted by Amber Hinds, Chris Hinds, and Steve Jones. They are experts in digital accessibility and creators of software, courses, and specialized services that have made millions of websites more accessible through their work.
To learn more about us, you can visit our website.
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Transcript
Chris Hinds: Welcome to Accessibility Craft, where we explore the complex challenges and emerging trends that are shaping digital accessibility, while sipping on unique craft beverages. This show is proudly produced by Equalize Digital, The most trusted name in WordPress accessibility. Join us every week as we break down accessibility news and share the expert strategies we’ve used to help make millions of websites more accessible.
Grab a drink, the show starts now!
Amber: Hey everybody, it’s Amber and I’m here today with Chris.
Chris: Hey, everybody.
Amber: And Steve,
Steve Jones: Hey everyone.
Amber: And this is episode number 162 of the Accessibility Craft Podcast. If you want show notes and a full transcript, you can find those if you go to AccessibilityCraft.com/162. We always start every episode with a beverage.
What are we drinking today, Chris?
Today’s Beverage
Chris: We are trying another Great Notion beer. The last one we had was named after a frozen treat, but this one is Great Notion Triple Berry Shake. And so this is a, a tart ale. I think it’s been a while since we’ve had a sour beer on the podcast, but I remember we all really liked the last one. But Triple Berry Shake, they say is the biggest and baddest of all of their shake series of tart ales. And they fermented it with black current, blackberries, blueberries, and finished with vanilla.
Amber: I am so excited to try this. And Steve wasn’t on the episode when we did the Tiger’s Blood. We had a guest for that episode. So have you ever had Great Notion before Steve?
Steve Jones: I have not. This is the first.
Amber: Awesome. I love their art. You were showing it to the camera.
Steve Jones: Yeah, it’s great.
Amber: So this is from Portland, Oregon. So I don’t know if he’s a lumberjack or if he’s just like a typical Portlandia dude with really baggy pants. And his butt area, it is just filled with berries and he is got yellow suspenders and he is drinking out of a glass.
It looks like it’s filled with berries. And he is got a yellow stocking cap on and he got a beard, a little more hair than Chris has. But, uh…
Chris: And he has…
Amber: Chris, you could maybe do this.
Chris: …got that sideways, mischevous glance.
Steve Jones: Yeah. Yeah.
Amber: Yeah.
Chris: You know, the pose actually kind of makes me think of the old school sunscreen bottles that had the, the girl on the beach with the puppy pulling on her swimsuit. I don’t know if you remember, if you can picture that.
Amber: Yeah. Yep. Yep.
Steve Jones: Yeah.
Amber: Their logo is very Portland too. It’s like the crossed axes with a beard and a stocking cap, but nothing for the face. So it just kind of gives the impression.
Steve Jones: Yeah.
Chris: Be careful when you open yours. I don’t know if you can see the top of my beer here, but it started to plan its escape route there.
Steve Jones: Oh no.
Amber: I hear Steve tapping.
Chris: The smell is kind of, kind of makes me think of a lambic. It’s definitely berry forward on the nose, which is what I would hope for
Amber: I bought a glass because I wanted to be able to see the color.
Steve Jones: Chris, did you say berry for it on the nose?
Chris: Berry forward. It’s berry forward or very forward, you decide.
Steve Jones: Oh, it’s, it’s, reddish or purple-ish, right? Hmm.
Amber: And it is got a lot of foam. I couldn’t pour. It says it’s one pint in this can, so it’s a big can. But with the foam, I couldn’t totally fill up my pint glass. So…
Chris: That’s good.
Amber: It’s really pretty. It’s got like a light pink foam.
Steve Jones: Yeah, that’s delicious.
Amber: You know what it smells like to me. I haven’t tasted it yet. It smells like berry flavored emergency. Have you guys ever had that?
Chris: It tastes better than berry flavored emergency. I’ll tell you that right now. It does not taste like medicine. 10% ABV on this. So be careful. This is definitely dangerous territory.
Steve Jones: I…
Chris: With how good it tastes.
Steve Jones: …haven’t…
Amber: Oh, it’s creamy.
Steve Jones: …eaten lunch.
Amber: Yeah, me neither. This will be a real fun podcast episode.
Chris: It’s, it’s thick. It’s got really, really good structure, like nice acidity. Just, I don’t know, the only way I can describe it is just like you took a mallet and rubbed it all over with berries and then just smacked someone in the face with it. It’s just like berries.
Amber: I get though. But what I really like about it. Is sometimes when you have things that say, like, this said vanilla or something somewhere. I guess it wasn’t on the can. You were reading something somewhere else. But like I get at the end, like a cream…
Steve Jones: Yeah.
Amber: Like whatever, if you think of like a creamsicle, that’s kind of what it, it’s like berries and cream. Like it really does taste like that and it’s got kind of like a creamy mouthfeel.
Chris: I wonder if they did lacto-fermentation on it.
Steve Jones: We don’t do a lot of sours and I like sours and every, and this one may be the best one I’ve ever had.
Amber: Oh, really? You put, you put that up there, huh?
Steve Jones: Well, let’s caveat that with, I haven’t had a whole bunch.
Chris: Yeah, I do think I like this more than what I remember about the hibiscus one we had way in the early days of the podcast. Because that one was sour, but it was kinda one note, like sour good. This one I feel like is a bit more complex. I can search for and pick out different berry flavors and, they don’t say there’s raspberry in it, but I swear I taste raspberry in here too. There…
Amber: yeah.
Chris: … probably isn’t raspberry in it, but tastes of like raspberry and blueberry. I don’t really taste currant.
Amber: I have to say, I don’t know if you all have visited their website, GreatNotion.com, but they must either have an illustrator on staff or pay… They invest in their designs for all of their different beers. There’s like a Yeti with a machine gun, I guess, I don’t know. Like creepy bears, like rabbits that look like they might be a little high.
Steve Jones: I like…
Amber: A pink buffalo
Steve Jones: …the…
Amber: Like….
Steve Jones: …Otter and it says, Welcome Back Otter. I might be aging myself. Like there was a show called Welcome Back Otter, back in the early eighties,
Chris: Oh.
Amber: That’s probably what it’s a reference to.
Steve Jones: Yeah. I mean, it totally is. It’s like a otter dressed up as like a, a teacher or an instructor or something.
Amber: They also make non-alcoholic hop water and root beer. Something that is non-alcoholic and called Ripe AF. And they all have like cool, interesting illustrations. I’m gonna give this a two thumbs up. I really like this a lot.
Steve Jones: Mm-hmm.
Amber: And it’s not something that I would normally think to order.
‘Cause I don’t always go towards something super fruity. But it’s really good.
Steve Jones: We, they’ve got one called Pulpatine. Like…
Amber: yeah.
Steve Jones: Pulpatine is the emperor of haze.
Chris: Apparently they have funny people on staff too that are good at puns.
Steve Jones: Yeah, like it’s like a Star Wars kind of.
Chris: Uhhuh. That’s great.
Steve Jones: It’s funny that the IPA gets to be the Palpatine
Amber: I would say that this brewery has branding down really well, and it does say that they ship some of their stuff nationwide. Did you order this directly from them, Chris, or did you find it locally?
Chris: I bought it direct, it’s stocked locally at at a store here.
Amber: So maybe people can find it near them in the US.
Chris: Yeah. If you’re in Texas shout out to HEB’s beer program, like their purchasers find interesting stuff and there’s always different stuff on the shelf when I go.
Well, I am also two thumbs up on Triple Berry Shake.
Steve Jones: Yes.
Chris: Phenomenal, delicious beer and the brewer should be proud.
Steve Jones: Yes, and contact us. We’ll help you with your website.
Amber: Oh. So I told people to go check it out. Does that mean that all those beautiful illustrations are missing all text, Steve?
Steve Jones: Yeah, I know, I know.
Amber: Oh, so sad.
Steve Jones: That’s an interesting thing, right? How important alt text is to these images. ‘Cause you don’t want to lose that. And how the description of these illustrations has to be almost as creative as the illustration itself.
Amber: Yeah, I mean, ’cause it really adds something, I think to why you might buy the beer or your experience or, or like understanding of what the brewer was going for.
Steve Jones: Yeah.
Amber: I do think like that kind of creativity adds to it a lot, and it would be sad to miss out on that if it wasn’t described appropriately.
Steve Jones: Now, luckily in this case, the taste lives up, so you could use your taste buds too.
Amber: Yes, yes, yes. Even if you can’t see the can, it is well worth the flavor in your mouth.
Chris: So good, so good. I’m gonna finish this and I will probably regret it as I’m trying to get more work done later.
Steve Jones: Mm-hmm.
Amber: Hey, look, it’s a Friday. Monday for everyone listening to this.
Chris: We’re making up for last time when we had water, right? So it just, it averages out to 5% ABV between the two episodes.
Amber: Yeah, you’re only allowed to order water like one time. Now we’re gonna be like, what? No.
Chris: I, I’ve played, I’ve played that card that, that’s done. I can’t do it ever again.
Amber: Mm-hmm.
Steve Jones: Is that called Accessibility Craft math there, Chris? What you just did?
Chris: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s exactly right. Accessibility Craft math. Oh man.
We React to the WebAIM Million 2026 Report
Amber: So speaking of math, the Web Aim Million, which is a very big number, report came out for 2026. For folks who are not familiar, this is a project that a nonprofit, they’re out of a university in Utah and they make the WAVE browser extension. And they use their rule set to scan the 1 million top pages by traffic on the internet.
I think they used to use Alexa rankings, but that’s gone now. So I don’t know what they use to determine this. Or if they’re just scanning the same pages every year and ignoring new websites. But this came out and I thought it would be interesting for us to talk about.
Chris: This has become like a, a landmark time every year when they release this for the accessibility industry, if you wanna call it that. Everyone always goes and looks. And I was, I gotta say, I was hoping to see the continuation of a trend line because it had kind of seemed like accessibility was going to hit some kind of ceiling and maybe start ticking down, but it didn’t do that, did it?
Amber: Yeah, so the first thing is they talk about the number of errors that they can detect, and they said across 1 million home pages, they detected 56,114,377 distinct accessibility errors, an average of 56.1 errors per page. And that was higher than last year.
Steve Jones: Yeah, it actually breaks a trend, right? Like, so the past six years it had been trending down ever so slightly, it…
Amber: except for 2024, right? Went up a little bit in 2024 and then started going back down.
Steve Jones: Yeah…
Chris: 2024 had a slight jump and then it went down again.
Steve Jones: Yeah. But we are trending up, again, for 2026, huh?
Chris: Mm-hmm.
Amber: Yeah, I mean they do acknowledge that homepage are getting more complex and the number of HTML elements that they see on the page. Like they’re longer, I guess, is the best way to describe that. So I don’t know if that increases the likelihood that you’re gonna find more problems because there’s more components.
What do you think Steve do? Do you think most websites still have carousels on their home pages?
Steve Jones: Do I think, I mean, they absolutely do, and I feel the the horrible pain of having to remediate them all the time.
Amber: Oh man. We’re working on a website right now that started with five or six carousels on the homepage.
Steve Jones: All autoplaying.
Chris: Yep.
Amber: We managed to convince them to turn two of them into not carousels.
Steve Jones: Yeah.
Amber: So they’re down to like three or four.
Steve Jones: The data tells you that they’re not really that useful, people are still putting carousels in that hero spot, and it’s, I don’t know why, trying to cram more information into a smaller area, but it actually doesn’t net all that much viewership past the first or second slide.
So I mean, I found it interesting when you said that when they claim that homepages are becoming more complex I sort of wonder if, I mean, in my mind I would kind of expect that to go the other way given people’s attention spans these days. I wonder if it’s more of a thing of, of they’re consolidating more of the information throughout the other verticals of the website on the homepage to try to capture, because attention rates are shorter and bounce rates are increasing.
Amber: Like you think maybe they’re thinking people are more likely to scroll than click, so we have to get more on our homepage so that it’s there when they scroll.
Steve Jones: I mean, we’re pretty conditioned to scroll these days.
Amber: Yeah. Yeah.
Chris: I think it’s the same reason that people are trying to cram as much as possible into their navigation menus. They’re trying to alleviate the same sort of thing where it’s, we’re worried that people aren’t going to find the information, so we have to stick it all right here in the hopes that they do.
I hope we get to run some experiments around this at some point, but I wonder if that actually gets the outcome that they think it does.
Steve Jones: Yeah, I mean I definitely feel like navigation menus in and of themselves have become much more complex as the years have gone on. And I think with that, surfacing all that information into mega menu or of sorts actually opens the door to lots of accessibility issues.
Amber: To be determined on whether we’ll have one on our new website rebuild. Can you tell there might be two different camps on this?
Steve Jones: Well…
Amber: There will definitely have to be multiple podcast episodes where we just talk about our new website that we are working on this year. And folks, we really are. I finished a design and content brief and it’s getting reviewed next week and we’ve been talking to designers to get quotes, so it is really happening. For real.
Chris: Mm-hmm.
Steve Jones: Yep.
Chris: So most common failures, I thought this was interesting. And I don’t know, they say homepage are getting more complex, but the stuff that is in this list is super basic. One is low contrast text found on 83.9% of homepage. Missing alt text on images, 53%. Missing form input labels, 51%. 46.3% had empty links. 30.6% had empty buttons. And 13.5% had missing document language. And I’m just gonna be open about lack of knowledge here. You’re gonna have to help me on that one. What does that mean missing document language?
Is that like the language attribute of the page or something else?
Steve Jones: Yeah, yeah. They’re not signifying that the language of this website is in English or Spanish.
Chris: Mm-hmm.
Steve Jones: Yeah. I’m not surprised by these at all, really. Low contrast text, that’s definitely always been a big one for us, and that’s why we actually put a lot of effort into our color contrast checks. We initially started with PHP, and then we moved to, you know, JavaScript scanning and using Axe and stuff to, to make sure that we’re actually detecting those accurately. We’re actually currently working on a way for you to remediate those low contrast issues in real time. So you see ’em on the page, you fix the colors, save and it’s remediated.
Amber: And wait, let’s clarify. The cool thing that I saw a demo of was you fix the colors right in Accessibility Checker where it flagged the issues. Not you have to go find them and fix them on your page and save your page. You can fix them right in Accessibility Checker. And it will fix them for you.
Steve Jones: A no code solution.
Amber: So…
Steve Jones: Yep.
Amber: Yeah, it’s like pick a different color out of the little, what do you call that color picker thing? You could drag around the dot.
Steve Jones: Yeah.
Amber: Yeah.
Steve Jones: It’s a web component. Just the color picker. The missing alternative text for images. Now, I’m sure that they are trying to decipher between, presentation images, images that are decorative in some respect. But what a lot of people, like, if it just doesn’t have alternative text, I don’t know if they’re doing any evaluation on that or not, because that is valid.
Amber: I think, I think well, okay, so I do think WAVE is like Accessibility Checker in that WAVE has an error for missing alternative text and for empty.
Steve Jones: Oh, so this is, if the attribute is…
Amber: This is what I don’t know, but this is what I’m guessing. Is that this issue, if it’s the exact same name as the way the WAVE browser extension works, then this means it doesn’t even have an empty alt attribute. It has no alt attribute at all. Which for people who aren’t familiar, what this means is that when a screen reader encounters an image with no alt attribute, it frequently reads out like the path or the file name to the image.
Chris: Yeah.
Amber: Which could be fine if you’re one of those super organized people who renames every image with something meaningful before you upload it to your website, which is maybe just a food blogger.
Steve Jones: Yeah.
Amber: Everyone else, it’s all like Shutterstock underscore, 5, 8, 6, 7, 9, 2, some really long string of numbers dot jpeg.
Steve Jones: Yeah. Yeah.
Amber: So I think that’s what that means. If this is the same, which I’m guessing it, it probably is. So it’s the same as what we do.
Steve Jones: Right, right.
Amber: I mean it doesn’t surprise me that these are common failures because I think when we remediate, these are like things that we see a bunch on people’s websites. I think they’re also easy to detect with automated tools. It’s entirely possible that there are other failures, like bad focus management opening your mobile menu that no automated tool can find, and therefore the Web AIM Million is not gonna be able to report on it. And maybe that even exists on all the websites, which maybe we could shout out.
I guess 4.1% of websites had zero problems.
Steve Jones: Yeah.
Amber: But they might have manual problems. I don’t know how, how indicative do you guys think that is?
Chris: They probably do have manual problems. And that’s something I frequently tell people, and I usually preface it by saying, I don’t like that I get to say this really, because it is a comment on the state of accessibility on the internet as a whole.
But if you come up completely clean for automated accessibility test, you’re probably in the top 10% of websites already. In terms of accessibility.
Amber: No, you’re in the top 4.1% of websites.
Chris: Yeah. In the, in this case, like even more, even more. You’re in the top four.
Amber: Though, maybe if somebody has a 100% score on WAVE, I think that does suggest that they’ve put some effort in.
Chris: Oh, of course.
Amber: And so it’s possible that some of them are actually legitimately 100% or as close to 100% accessible as they could be. Like they they would also pass a manual audit, I’m thinking.
Steve Jones: Well, I mean this is really nuanced too because like we had this discussion when we were , recently revamping our Accessibility Checker dashboard pages and the reports that get put out and really trying to think deeply about the language we’re using and the numbers we’re using and how we’re grouping things and stuff like that. The page in which you’re scanning matters a whole bunch too. So out of those top 4%, you know, like you could be scanning like, you know, CNN.com right? And like that’s a new site with tons of content. Or you could be scanning Google.com, which is like a search bar, right? And if Accessibility Checker, you scan a page and it says like a hundred percent passed test, right? We’re like, oh, that looks really good. But it’s like, well, what if, what percentage of those tests didn’t it even apply to that page?
Amber: Yeah, because there was not even any content of that type. Yeah.
Steve Jones: Yeah, you’re getting credit for a test that the questions didn’t even apply to your situation.
Chris: Mm-hmm.
Steve Jones: There’s always that nuance when you’re scanning websites, right?
The CMS Breakdown: Is WordPress falling behind in accessibility?
Amber: Yeah, so I always think it’s really interesting on this report to look at the content management systems and one of the things that I thought was super interesting before we reveal for folks who haven’t seen the report, like where all they are, I wanna talk about something that I noticed that was different this year from all prior years.
Which was that in prior years, this section of the report included WordPress, but it also called Elementor, Divi, and WP Bakery, which are popular WordPress builders. And way back in 2023, I was like, I’ve talked to them about this. And I was like, can you please clarify for me, are the Elementor and the Divi and all those numbers included in the WordPress number two?
And they were like, yes. So I was like, so they’re double counting. It was very weird. And then I noticed this year they did not pull out those three builders. They just left WordPress as its own line. I don’t know if that’s based on feedback from me and other folks that that was confusing and it muddies the water.
I almost feel like you should have WordPress in this view of content management and then have a separate chart that’s like, here’s all the WordPress plugins or something. I don’t know, but I thought that was interesting.
Chris: That is interesting. Well, do you want me to go through and kind of give people the breakdown and, I’ll read through this for the listening audience, and in post, I will put this chart up visually for people.
Amber: Sure.
Chris: At the top, basically they sorted content management systems and site builders in descending order from those who fell the farthest below the average number of errors all the way down to the one that was the most above average in terms of number of errors. So best to worst would be the shorthand way of putting that. Adobe Experience Manager made the top. They’re on 6,500 homepages average of 29.9 errors, which is 46.7% below the average, which I think was, was that 50 or 51, Amber?
Amber: 56.1 errors per page. That is the average of everything they scanned.
Chris: Okay, so all of these are benchmarked against that. Squarespace is on 2,670, 33 errors, 41.2% below average on that. Wix 3,183, 33.3 errors, 40.6% below average. Hubspot on 4,237 homepages, 35.1 average number of errors, 37.4% below average. TYPO3 CMS, which I’ve never even heard of, on 5,371 homepages. So more market share than Squarespace, or Wix, or HubSpot. 38.5 average number of errors, 31.3% below average. Drupal on 18,222 homepage, 41.2 average number of errors, 26.5% below the benchmark. Joomla 3,981, 45.7 average number of errors, 18.6% below the benchmark.
And then there’s WordPress on 252,302 of the homepage, so a full more than 25% of the Web AIM Million. Average number of errors is 52.8, sitting just 5.8% below the benchmark. And then maybe just put there so WordPress doesn’t have to feel bad, coming in last place, we have 1 C-Bitrix, which I’ve never heard of, on 8,769 homepages, average number of errors of 106.5, 89.8% above the benchmark. And that is not a good above the benchmark. You want to be below the benchmark in this case.
Amber: So I wanna say something about 1 C-Bitrix. I also had never heard of this, I Googled it. It’s like a Russian page builder. I don’t know, my assumption is like even if you go to information pages for it, it’s all in like some language characters that are not even the normal English alphabet. Do you think that could impact the WAVE scan results if it’s a non-English website?
Chris: Well, how does WAVE check for like ambiguous anchor text and stuff, or does it not?
Amber: I don’t think WAVE. Oh, we have that check. We’re better than them.
Chris: That was one that, that we have that WAVE doesn’t. Okay.
Steve Jones: I will say these numbers, like the number of homepages, I don’t know, is indicative of market share, but it’s, it’s indicative of the share of the sampling size that Web AIM Million took. And we did state that we’re not a hundred percent sure what they used to define these top 1 million websites.
It is interesting that WordPress has the lion’s share of those websites. And that’s not unexpected, right? With 40% market share. But I don’t know if that 250,000 makes percentage market easier or harder to hit, you know?
Amber: Oh, it increases the likelihood that there’ll be worse pages on average?
Steve Jones: I mean, it increases the likelihood of a lot of things, right? It increases the, the likelihood of, of a more complex page, right? WordPress is a little bit different than Squarespace. Squarespace is more of a non-technical user is serving themselves to build a little website for their small business, right? WordPress is the same, but also WordPress goes into enterprise and that’s when WordPress really spans out into a wide swath of audiences from the small mom and pop business to huge enterprise businessess. To the White House to a NASA, you know, like huge websites. So I don’t know if that increases their chances to…
Amber: In theory, I would say the huge websites probably should help. There was another part of this report where they talk about the domain extensions or the industry. And government, for example, the average number of errors was 42.4, so it was 24% better than the average. But if you just filtered down to like a .gov, so like US government. It’s 18.5 is the average number of errors. Compare that to the 56. So those are a lot better. And so there’s no, I mean I could be wrong, but I don’t think there’s any .govs built with Wix or Squarespace. And so like…
Chris: Doubt it.
Amber: I think like I think the bigger things that are built with like WordPress or Drupal probably help average out the…
Steve Jones: Yeah.
Amber: I can just go DIY, my own website people. Who are more likely to have accessibility problems, I would think, but…
Chris: I would suspect too that something that has a not insignificant influence on these scores is capabilities around platform control. So, Adobe, Squarespace, Wix, HubSpot, know about TYPO3. But the top four, at least I surmise, are closed source proprietary platforms where they control their code base.
And so anything that they don’t expose for user control or user entry, they have the full control and capability to control those outcomes.
Steve Jones: Yeah.
Amber: It’s so weird to me that this is missing, Shopify is not on here. There’s gotta be massive Shopify websites that get huge amounts of traffic. But footnote to the point you were making, Chris, which is that we’ve done auditing and user testing on Shopify websites, and you know what always works great for users? It’s the checkout page. And the reason why is that the, the website owner cannot control the Shopify checkout page. Shopify does.
Chris: Mm-hmm.
Amber: But if you’re using WooCommerce to build your store, if you’re using WooCommerce out of the box, they’ve done a lot of work to make it accessible. But the moment you’re all like, I want a fancy plugin that makes my checkout look different, guess what happens?
Steve Jones: Mm-hmm.
Amber: Shopify has made the choice that nobody can modify the checkout page, and in the end, I think that that gives better results.
Steve Jones: Yeah, I mean, WordPress is a very free and open platform, and with great freedoms come, great responsibilities.
Amber: It’s like the best movie quote ever.
Steve Nerds Out About JavaScript Frameworks, EmDash
Steve Jones: I want to just go a, a step further down this report a little bit, and I want to touch on JavaScript frameworks just briefly and only to compare it to WordPress. So I didn’t notice that Astro is listed in the JavaScript frameworks. And if you don’t know, Astro is a framework. It’s been around, I dunno, a few years, but it’s recently been acquired by CloudFlare.
And CloudFlare has built it into their own WordPress competitor called EmDash that came out on April Fool’s Day. Wasn’t a joke, it’s a real thing. But if we look at Astro it has 5,500 ish home pages that were checked in this report. Average number of errors per page are nine and percent difference from the median is 84%. So if you juxtapose that with WordPress, it’s sitting at 5.8% and Astro is sitting at 84%. Now these frameworks are quite different. Astro on the surface, this is not speaking about EmDash. EmDash is Astro with Cloudflare’s CMS. I think it’s a CMS package, I’m not sure. But with their CMS kind of bundled together into one framework. But Astro itself basically helps you build static websites , but you have the option to actually use, you know, dynamic content within those websites. Such as like, a little component on a static page. So you can actually build something pretty interesting that gives you that single page kind of feel or look, and still have dynamic content in it, but still have a lot of static HTML.
And I don’t know if I’m just pontificating a little bit that maybe since it is a static site builder and it is built on, HTML semantics, maybe that’s what bodes well for that having such, a low average number of issues per page.
Now this is a small sampling. We do have to take that into consideration, but I, found it interesting.
Amber: I mean, I do too. Compared to React, right?
Steve Jones: Yeah. Yeah.
Amber: And that is better than the average. But it’s 43.5 errors versus the 9 for Astro. I mean, let’s be real, an average of nine errors per page is almost close to perfect. I don’t think there’s any other thing on this report that is that close to no problems at all.
Steve Jones: Yeah.
Amber: And I, I don’t know, like, it is just interesting to me.
Chris: It’s worth a deeper look.
Amber: ‘Cause this is, this is a newer framework, right? It wasn’t in last year’s report. Do you have any idea, Steve, on like why this one would be better than React or Next JS or Vue?
Steve Jones: Oh yeah. So I’ve done some testing. I actually built a little application with Astro, just some internal stuff for us, testing for future things that we’re working on. And you couple it with AI and it’s quite enlightening and quite jarring how far you can go, how quick you can go with Astro when you’re building something that is basically using HTML semantics.
It’s getting compiled out as HTML semantics. And that’s probably why it bodes well, because it’s, end of the day, it’s HTML. Know, it’s not WordPress, not WordPress with a page builder, with additional page builder add-ons put on there where you have to consider all these other people’s technical accessibility debt as well.
And AI is very good at understanding semantic HTML, just like with markup files. AI is very good at it because there’s really, it’s basic and there’s really only one right way to do it. It’s very semantic the way the way it’s written and it understands what a heading is like.
It understands in the order those headings should go. It understands what a landmark is and where it should go. And, you couple AI and Astro together and you can build something really quick, really fast. That’s that’s, you know, native HTML and semantic. In WordPress, a lot of times you’re relying on a lot of humans in between you and your end product. And humans…
Amber: Fewer content entry issues you think?
Steve Jones: Well, I mean, yeah, in my use of AI is, it is a lot of times considering accessibility, at least at a base level, of the box. Especially if you’re building in a framework like Astro. It has all this context that this is HTML semantics that need to be followed. Whereas in WordPress, you’re layering a lot of things. WordPress core has implications on the output of your semantics and, by and large, built by humans. This is not a slight on humans. Humans are great and humans can do this better than than AI. Then you have a theme which is built on top of core, right?
And that goes in, and that’s built by humans. And then you have plugins, that integrate into core, and integrate into the theme. And you have all, all of that potential technical debt or potential accessibility debt, which is not a real term, I just made it up right here, right now. But you have all of that potential built into that stack. Whereas if you strip it all back to just you and AI terminal and Astro. It’s just you three right there, building semantically.
Chris: And things like it have I think, captured the imaginations of some people. It kind of feels like a next evolution, at least conceptually. I don’t know if EmDash will be the thing, right? But it seems like WordPress has some work to do based on this report and has some catching up to do.
Amber was there a final thought you wanted to share? And I think we need to go to commercial because our, our intro topic has lasted almost 40 minutes.
Amber: No, I mean, I was just gonna say like, I think that goes a little bit back to why we might potentially see fewer issues on these more restrictive platforms like Squarespace and Wix. Because of the fact that they don’t have the broad contributor community, they don’t have the ability to add a lot of custom code in the same way that you can with a WordPress or Joomla or Drupal.
And so it know it, it adds that power, but it also adds problems. So yeah, we can go to a commercial and then come back and talk about what can WordPress do to get better.
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WordPress Accessibility Needs You on Global Accessibility Awareness Day
Amber: All right, so we’re back. And of course. This episode is coming out at the beginning of May. And May is GAAD and we always host a contributor day, always by which, I mean, this is our second annual hosted contributor day for GAAD.
And I’m really excited about it. And I think on the tail of the Web AIM Million coming out, but wouldn’t it be great if WordPress could be better than Drupal, right? Which also has the plugins and also fights for market share on the government and the edus and all that kind of stuff.
I would love to see that. So I think GAAD is a great opportunity to try and make WordPress better, and maybe we can move that percentage point a little bit. I don’t know.
Steve Jones: Yeah. Yeah, I would agree. So you keep saying GAAD, which for those not listening, could you please describe what GAAD stands for and maybe go into a little bit more on why we do a contributor day for GAAD?
Amber: Yes. So GAAD stands for Global Accessibility Awareness Day. I think this year is its 15th year. It’s a nonprofit organization to raise awareness about the importance of accessibility and in particular accessibility on the web. But they also do stuff around accessibility in products and the built environment.
One of the co-founders of GAAD is blind and he is actually the head of accessibility at LinkedIn. And so they have been doing this on the third Thursday of the month for 15 years and trying to encourage companies and individuals to talk about accessibility on that day and do things to support accessibility on that day with the idea that it will bring more awareness to the general public if everyone is doing it all at the same time.
So that’s what GAAD is. We do a contributor day, because initially our first couple years that we were involved with GAAD, we held a webinar. And, there are a ton of organizations that have free webinars on GAAD, and I think that’s phenomenal and it is a great way to spread awareness.
But I asked myself , is this actually the best way to have impact? And last year we were talking about it internally and we thought, you know, no, just holding a webinar that people can show up to for an hour or 90 minutes, it presents theoretical concepts, it provides some training, but it doesn’t actually make any difference on that day.
And also there’s a lot of webinars happening, so people have to choose. And then it becomes this weird like you’re fighting for attention on your webinar. And I just felt like it wasn’t very impactful. And so we were talking about it as a team last year and we’re like, you know, we’ve all enjoyed going to Word Camps and participating in contributor days.
And then we thought, can we host our own contributor day? And we tried it last year and I thought it was great. And so we’re making this our annual GAAD tradition.
And I’m wondering if we should talk first about what the impact was last year and why we decided to make it an annual tradition. Would you wanna talk about that, Chris?
Chris: So we led this call with a big, long, you know, thing about how WordPress has some catching up to do. And the amazing thing about WordPress and the behemoth that it is, is it got there because of people, and I think the power of people and the power of people in WordPress can’t be understated.
So last year, 86 people volunteered or pledged 382 hours to improve accessibility across the WordPress ecosystem for GAAD. And that was on May 15th. So that was 382 hours by 86 people on a single day, which is amazing to see. And we hope that that builds new habits and carries things forward throughout the year and beyond.
And we hope to see some of those people back this year. But just a handful of things that happened that kind of jumped out at me. Someone ran a accessibility focus bug scrub in WordPress core. So any of those bugs that got fixed or scrubbed were you know, that impacted millions and millions of websites right there.
A guy fixed accessibility using Accessibility Checker and WAVE on his own website. So that’s just one website, but I bet he learned a lot.
Someone educated their clients about accessibility and held a webinar for their customers.
A couple of guys made the Include Mastodon Feed Plugin more accessible. Not sure how many sites that plugin is installed on, but hey, that’s pretty awesome.
Someone improved accessibility in their YouTube videos, so kind of WordPress adjacent, but it was still accessibility work. And we had multiple people saying that they were, you know, learning and then taking what they learned that same day and going and fixing problems on what they learned that day, which is pretty cool. And that’s just, that’s just a smattering.
But I, I hope it’s bigger this year. I hope even more people participate. And even last year for our first year doing it, I was kind of blown away by the response and how many people ended up doing stuff.
Amber: Yeah, I think we should shout out rtCamp in particular, which I know is…
Chris: Oh yeah.
Amber: …at, the very bottom, ’cause I alphabetical ordered that recap post, which we will share in our show notes for anyone who wants to read it. But rtCamp is a company that contributes to WordPress core and they told all of their employees who normally work on WordPress but don’t normally work on accessibility to go work on accessibility things during that day.
And on that day, they had 13 employees working on accessibility related things. They collectively pledged 104 hours. Contributed to 21 open accessibility issues in Gutenberg, WordPress core, and WooCommerce. And they opened eight pull requests with patches, two of which were actually merged during that day into WordPress for a release.
So like that right there, if we, they don’t normally work on accessibility, these contributors, but I think like that was what I was hoping. I was like, I wanna get normal contributors to work on accessibility and be like, oh, I can do this. I can contribute to accessibility beyond. So I thought that was really awesome and I love that that company was willing to be like, Hey, let’s tell all of our team to go work on this today.
Chris: So for the companies listening, for the individuals listening, whoever you are, what are ways that people can get involved this year? Let’s tell them right now.
Steve Jones: Yeah, so on the code side , we’ve kind of mentioned a few of these, like contributing to core. What does that mean? That means actually writing code and patches that can go into WordPress core that you would submit as a PR, but not only that, you can actually go to the tickets and actually review tickets and just add input from maybe a development standpoint or, try to come up with solutions to add to the conversation about an accessibility issue. And you can filter out track tickets by accessibility.
You can do testing, you can test plugins, you can test themes, and then from that testing, you can open tickets. That’s actually contributing. You can update your own plugins. You can update other people’s plugins. You can add patches, I think sometimes we get caught up that accessibility is, you know, only about, alt text or it’s only about color contrast, but it also can be about language and expanding and making your plugin more accessible to more languages around the globe. Which is something that we did last year. We went through in, in our plugins and we added support for 30 some languages, 32 languages. I don’t remember. 34 at this point. I think it’s gone up.
Can request people to do it in the Polyglot team, but you can also just make your products, your plugins, your themes translate-able. And that is a great step to having translations and internationalization of your plugin. So I wouldn’t overlook that. And last year I gave a day and another person on my team gave a day. We made a plugin in a day to add pause buttons to gif images. And this is a plugin that is freely available on GitHub, which we will link here in the show notes.
What Equalize Digital is doing for GAAD
Amber: Yeah. On the accessibility testing note, I know I was all like, we’re not gonna run webinars, but then I realized I really wanna run a webinar, but it’s not a show up and watch webinar. We are going to do a live theme accessibility testing workshop. So I, over the last year with Joe Dolson put a ton of time and effort into totally rereading the accessibility ready guidelines for themes for WordPress.
And I created a whole process for testing those with the goal that anyone can test. You do not have to be an accessibility expert. You can follow step-by-step instructions. But to make it even easier, I’m gonna say this right now, there are, today, 109 themes that have the accessibility ready tag.
They’ve been tested some of them, many, many, many years ago, many, many updates ago. My hope for the day is that we will get enough people to retest every single one of those themes on the day and be able to share feedback with the developers. I will be running a webinar at 10:00 AM. US Central Time, which is 3:00 PM UTC, if that helps folks.
Where it is a workshop, you’ll show up and people will pick themes and get assigned to themes and I will walk you through the process and you’ll do it with me. So you’ll get to learn by doing and contribute to WordPress at the same time. So I will say like, that is another way to get involved and help with the project and learn, while you’re doing it.
Do you have any thoughts, Chris, on like other things that maybe non-technical folks can do? ‘Cause I know you contributed last year as a, you know, you’re not a developer and you’re not an accessibility specialist. What, what would you recommend for those people who wanna get involved?
Chris: I think for the truly non-technical people who are like, what’s a widget, or what’s the classic editor? I’ve never heard of that. Who are maybe truly, you know, just getting into WordPress or just starting to do web stuff. I would try to find something that you could do maybe in inside of something you’re already familiar with, like maybe it’s your own company’s website, or maybe it’s something you’re working on. Find something that you can improve related to accessibility in that.
So a simple example in WordPress might be if you’ve ever gone into the WordPress editor even one time, you’ve probably seen that you have the ability to, add or modify images, and if your website has images on it, maybe you could start by just adding alternative text to some images on your website and you can look up an article on what alternative text is and how to add it. We have a very helpful one on in the Accessibility Checker documentation if you need something and, and just start there.
Like if you’re looking for something really simple and repeatable and, and spend some time doing that until you’re comfortable and then maybe you could try something else. But I would look at it as a doorway into a bigger world.
If you struggle, I wouldn’t be too hard on yourself either. And the nice thing about the WordPress space and the WordPress community is if you ask for help, in WordPress Slack or in other places, maybe on Reddit, there’s a great WordPress subreddit. Someone’s gonna help you.
Amber: We should shout out our Facebook group. Our Facebook group is very much like, come and get help from the community. It is not us selling you things and you can tell because we don’t post in there all the time. But on that day, Paola, our content specialist, and Maria, our accessibility specialist, and myself will be available.
We will be really paying attention to the Facebook group. So Make WordPress Slack would be great if you’re trying to contribute on the dev end and you wanna talk about specific tickets. But if you’re trying to do other accessibility things for GAAD, then come in our Facebook group, which you can find linked in the footer of the Equalize Digital website.
Or you can just search WordPress Accessibility and find groups on Facebook. And that is another great place to get ideas and help on that day. ‘Cause we will definitely be there on that day as well as a lot of other wonderful people from the community.
Chris: Awesome. Well, thank you everyone for tuning in and we hope to see you during Global Accessibility Awareness Day. Please go to, if you feel so inclined, EqualizeDigital.com/GAAD2026 G-A-A-D-2-0-2-6 and put in your pledge whether you’re changing alt text, attending theme testing, or doing stuff on track tickets with Steve and William. Whatever it is you’re doing, we would love to have you come out and pledge.
Amber: Thanks!
Steve Jones: Yep.
Amber: Cheers.
Steve Jones: Cheers.
Thanks for listening to Accessibility Craft. If you found this episode valuable, please help us reach more people by subscribing, reviewing, or liking the show, and sharing this with your colleagues. Accessibility Craft is a production of Equalize Digital Inc. Steve Jones composed our theme music. To learn how Equalize Digital can support you on your accessibility journey, visit us at EqualizeDigital.com.