Common Accessibility Problems to Avoid in 2026

Here are the problems we still see most often, and how to catch them.

What's changed since 2020

We originally wrote this post in 2020, since then:

WCAG 2.2 became a W3C standard in October 2023. It adds nine success criteria to WCAG 2.1 and drops one (4.1.1 Parsing, which browsers made obsolete). For most sites, AA against 2.2 is now the target.

The European Accessibility Act has applied since 28 June 2025. It covers services like e-commerce, banking and transport sold to people in the EU, and that includes UK businesses selling into the EU.

In the UK, public sector websites are monitored against WCAG 2.2 AA under the Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulations.

Start with automated tools

Three earn their place: Lighthouse, built into Chrome; Microsoft's Accessibility Insights, which has a quick check and a much more thorough guided assessment; and axe DevTools. They're quick and they catch a lot. Run them on every template, not only the homepage.

Automated tools aren't enough

Passing Lighthouse doesn't mean a page is accessible. Automated checks only catch a minority of WCAG issues, and the rest needs a person. On one slider we shipped, slides were hidden from screen readers with aria-hidden="true" but still had focusable elements inside them. Lighthouse was happy. A keyboard user wasn't.

Test with a keyboard and a screen reader

Unplug the mouse and tab through the page:

• Is every interaction reachable and usable without a mouse?
• Is it always obvious which element is focused?
• Does the focus order follow the visual order?
• Is the focused element ever hidden behind a sticky header or cookie banner? WCAG 2.2 made that a failure.

Then try a screen reader. VoiceOver is built into every Mac and iPhone, and NVDA is free on Windows. You don't need to be an expert to notice an unlabelled button, or a form that reads out as a string of "edit text".

The problems we see most

Missing or meaningless alt text. "IMG_4032.jpg" isn't a description. This is mostly an editing problem rather than a development one, so the CMS should make it easy. In Craft, alt text lives on the image itself, and on the sites we look after an AI-written first draft is waiting for editors to check.

Removed focus styles. Stripping outlines takes away the only signal keyboard users have. Use :focus-visible to show a clear focus ring to keyboard users without it appearing on every mouse click. Restyle it, don't remove it.

Modals that leak focus. When a dialog opens, focus should stay inside it until it closes. In 2020 we reached for a focus-trap library. Today the native <dialog> element, opened with showModal(), makes the rest of the page inert for you.

"Click here" links. Screen reader users often move through a page by its list of links, out of context. Make the link text say where it goes.

Small targets. WCAG 2.2 asks for things people tap or click to be at least 24 by 24 pixels, or to have enough space around them. Icon buttons and tightly packed footer links are the usual culprits.

Logins that need a memory test. Puzzle CAPTCHAs and password fields that block pasting both fall foul of WCAG 2.2's accessible authentication criterion. Let password managers do their job.

Reaching for ARIA first. ARIA fills the gaps HTML can't describe, but a native <button> or <nav> beats a <div> with a role every time. Bad ARIA is worse than none.

Accessibility is an editing job too

A site can launch accessible and drift. New pages go up, images go in without alt text, a heading gets picked because it looked the right size. The CMS matters here. Craft's control panel is built to WCAG 2.2 and ATAG 2.0, the standard for authoring tools, so editors with disabilities can use it and everyone gets nudged towards accessible content. On sites with our Craft CMS support, the AI accessibility review in our Mutual One marketing platform gives editors a second pair of eyes on their pages.

The short version

Run the automated tools, then test with a keyboard and a screen reader. Audits on their own don't prove a site is accessible. If you'd like a second opinion on yours, drop us a line at hello@mutual.agency.