Digital accessibility
statistics 2026

European and international legislation

• Member states had to transpose the EAA by June 2022. It covers, among others, computers and operating systems, ATMs and ticketing machines, smartphones, telephony, banking services, e-books, passenger transport services and e-commerce (European Commission)
• Microenterprises with fewer than 10 employees and under EUR 2 million turnover are exempt from some requirements; penalties are set by each member state (Travers Smith, 2025)
• Self-service terminals already in use may stay in service until the end of their economic life, with a maximum of 20 years (Travers Smith, 2025)
• In the Netherlands the ACM supervises webshops and electronic communication services such as chat and (video) calling since 28 June 2025; other regulators supervise other sectors (ACM, 2025)
• WCAG 2.0 dates from 11 December 2008, WCAG 2.1 from 5 June 2018; WCAG 2.1 added 17 success criteria; WCAG 2.2 has 13 guidelines and is published as ISO/IEC 40500:2025 (W3C WAI, 2025)
• WCAG 2.1 Level A and AA together contain 50 success criteria (the often quoted 78 includes Level AAA) (Deque)
• WCAG 2.2 removed criterion 4.1.1 Parsing as obsolete; the other WCAG 2.0 and 2.1 criteria are essentially the same (W3C, 2023)
• In the US, state and local government websites and apps must meet WCAG 2.1 AA; after a 2026 extension the deadlines are 26 April 2027 (50,000+ residents) and 26 April 2028 (smaller entities) (ADA.gov, 2026)

Legal developments (United States)

• 5,114 digital accessibility lawsuits were filed in the US in 2025, 3,195 of them (62%) in federal court (UsableNet, 2025)
• E-commerce accounted for 70% of these cases, followed by food service (21%) and healthcare (2%) (UsableNet, 2025)
• 1,427 cases targeted companies that had already been sued: 45% of federal filings (UsableNet, 2025)
• Federal website accessibility lawsuits rose 27% to 3,117 in 2025 (2,452 in 2024), 36% of all 8,667 ADA Title III filings; New York 1,021, Florida 961, Illinois 585 (Seyfarth Shaw, 2026)
• In Robles v. Domino's the Ninth Circuit held in 2019 that ADA Title III applies to the website and app; the Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal and the case settled in 2022 (Level Access)
• In the 2008 Target settlement the company paid USD 6 million in class damages plus over USD 3 million in plaintiff legal fees (W3C WAI Business Case)

Global figures

• At least 2.2 billion people have a near or distance vision impairment; for more than 1 billion of them it could have been prevented or has not yet been addressed (WHO, 2026)
• 430 million people (over 5% of the world) need rehabilitation for disabling hearing loss; by 2050 this rises to over 700 million, or 1 in 10 people (WHO, 2026)
• Nearly 2.5 billion people are projected to have some degree of hearing loss by 2050 (WHO, 2026)
• More than 2.5 billion people need one or more assistive products; by 2050 about 3.5 billion (WHO, 2024)
• 80 million people need a wheelchair, but only 5-35% have access to one, depending on the country (WHO, 2024)
• About 1 in 12 men has a color vision deficiency, so color alone should never carry meaning (National Eye Institute)
• US disability types among adults: cognition 13.9%, mobility 12.2%, hearing 6.2% and vision 5.5% (CDC, 2024)
• Some persons with disabilities die up to 20 years earlier than persons without disabilities (WHO, 2023)

Economic impact

• Using a broader definition, Return on Disability counts 1.58 billion people aged 5+ (about 22%) with a disability and says disability touches 63% of the global population including friends and family (Return on Disability, 2024)
• In the US, 77 million people with disabilities of working age (25-64) have USD 1.3 trillion in disposable income (Return on Disability, 2024)
• The UK "purple pound", the spending power of disabled people and their households, is estimated at GBP 274 billion a year; the UK counts 16.1 million disabled people (1 in 4) (Scope)
• UK shoppers who click away from inaccessible websites took GBP 17.1 billion elsewhere in 2019 up from GBP 11.75 billion in 2016 (Click-Away Pound, 2019)
• 7 in 10 disabled customers said they will click away from a website they find difficult to use (stated intent, 2016 survey) (Scope / Click-Away Pound, 2016)
• Vision impairment costs an estimated USD 411 billion (PPP) a year in lost productivity; unaddressed hearing loss almost USD 1 trillion (WHO, 2026, WHO, 2026)

Conversion and user experience

• 69% of US consumers watch video with the sound off in public places and 25% even in private; 80% of caption users are not deaf or hard of hearing (5,616 respondents) (Verizon Media/Publicis via Streaming Media, 2019)
• After adding transcripts, This American Life saw 6.86% more search traffic and 4.18% more unique visitors; 7.23% of visitors viewed at least one transcript (W3C WAI Business Case)
• Shopping sites average 71.0 errors per home page, 26.6% above the overall average: a reason to build accessibility into every landing page from the start (WebAIM Million, 2026)
• The Dutch ACM tested about 100 of the largest webshops plus large telecom and energy sites: on 61% you could not place an order with assistive technology; another 33% had serious problems (ACM, 2026)

Brand reputation and inclusion

• Companies leading in disability inclusion also had 2x more economic profit and were more likely to outperform industry peers in productivity, by 25% (about 346 companies, 2015-2022) (Accenture, 2023)
• In the UK and EU, 125 million people with disabilities of working age have USD 1.3 trillion in disposable income; with friends and family the total is USD 9.1 trillion (Return on Disability, 2024)

Overlapping factors

Digital accessibility and SEO share their building blocks. Search engine crawlers, like screen readers, depend on structured HTML, text alternatives for images and clear link text. What is good for screen readers is often good for search engines too. No study we could verify shows a fixed ranking gain from WCAG conformance, so below you will find the measurable overlap. For Dutch companies, what these figures mean when building a site: read more about having a website built (in Dutch).

• Home pages now contain 29.9 headings on average (+20.4% in one year); a clean heading structure helps screen reader users and gives search engines the outline of the page (WebAIM Million, 2026)
• 10.8% of images that do have alt text use questionable or repetitive text and 8.5% of alt texts end in a file extension such as ".jpg" (WebAIM Million, 2026, Web Almanac, 2025)
• 69% of pages pass the Lighthouse alt text audit, with no significant change from earlier years (Web Almanac, 2025)
• 87.3% of home pages define a document language, which screen readers use for pronunciation (WebAIM Million, 2026)
• Only 46.1% of home pages have a main landmark and 18.8% a search landmark; 84.3% have at least one landmark (WebAIM Million, 2026)
• 93.2% of home pages use a valid HTML5 doctype (79.1% in 2021) (WebAIM Million, 2026)

Business case for a combined approach

• Transcripts also earned 3.89% more new inbound links to the This American Life pages (W3C WAI Business Case)
• 80% of people who use captions are not deaf or hard of hearing, so text versions of video reach a far larger audience (Verizon Media/Publicis via Streaming Media, 2019)
• Ambiguous link text appears 5.3 times per affected page on average, down from 6.8 in 2025 (23.2% of pages had them in 2020) (WebAIM Million, 2026)

Screen readers and tools

• Primary desktop screen readers: JAWS 40.5%, NVDA 37.7%, VoiceOver 9.7% (1,539 respondents, December 2023 to January 2024) (WebAIM Screen Reader Survey, 2024)
• Commonly used screen readers: NVDA 65.6%, JAWS 60.5%, VoiceOver 43.9%, Narrator 37.3%, so testing with more than one is sensible (WebAIM Screen Reader Survey, 2024)
• 49.5% of screen reader users use a screen reader about equally on mobile and desktop; 40.2% mostly on desktop, 10.2% mostly on mobile (WebAIM Screen Reader Survey, 2024)
• 34.6% of screen reader users felt the web had become more accessible over the past year, 46.8% saw no change and 18.6% found it less accessible (WebAIM Screen Reader Survey, 2024)

Trends for 2026-2028

• ARIA use keeps rising: 133 ARIA attributes per home page on average, up 27% in one year and over 6 times the 2019 level; WebAIM links the growing complexity to automated or AI-assisted coding (WebAIM Million, 2026)
• Overlay use grew from 1.0% to 2.1% of desktop pages and from 0.8% to 1.8% of mobile pages; among the top 1,000 sites it is only 0.2% (Web Almanac, 2025)
• The December 2024 version of WCAG 2.2 is expected to be published as ISO/IEC 40500:2026 by late 2026 (W3C WAI, 2025)
• The global need for assistive products grows from 2.5 billion to about 3.5 billion people by 2050, driven by ageing and noncommunicable diseases (WHO, 2024)