Accessibility failures are not evenly distributed. A small number of issues account for the vast majority of barriers that users with disabilities encounter online. The WebAIM Million — an annual study of the top one million websites — consistently finds that over 95% of home pages have detectable WCAG failures, and the same few issue types appear again and again.
After scanning hundreds of Irish websites with A11YO, the pattern is the same here. Below are the five issues that come up most often, what they mean for real users, and what you need to ask your developer to do about them.
1. Images with no text description
The issue: Images on the website have no alternative text — the short description that screen readers read aloud when a blind user reaches an image.
What it means for users: A person using a screen reader hears nothing, or worse, hears the filename — something like "IMG_20240312_083421.jpg". They have no idea what the image shows or what it's trying to communicate.
The fix: Every meaningful image on your site needs an alt attribute containing a short, plain English description of what the image shows. Decorative images (backgrounds, dividers) should have an empty alt attribute (alt="") so screen readers skip them.
How common is it: WebAIM found missing or empty alt text on 39% of home pages in 2024. It is consistently the most frequently detected WCAG failure globally.
A screen reader user hears "IMG_20240312_083421.jpg". That is what a missing alt attribute sounds like.
2. Poor colour contrast
The issue: Text on the website doesn't have enough contrast against its background, making it difficult or impossible to read for users with low vision, colour blindness, or anyone reading in bright sunlight.
What it means for users: Pale grey text on a white background, or light green text on a dark green background, is invisible to a significant portion of your audience. Approximately 8% of men and 0.5% of women have some form of colour vision deficiency.
The fix: WCAG 2.2 AA requires a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 for normal text and 3:1 for large text. Your designer or developer can check this using free tools — A11YO's colour contrast checker is one of them. The most common culprits are light grey placeholder text, small print, and text overlaid on images.
This is often a quick design fix: darken the text colour slightly, or lighten the background. It doesn't require a redesign.
3. Form fields with no labels
The issue: Input fields — name, email, phone, message — don't have visible labels or programmatic labels that screen readers can read.
What it means for users: A screen reader user navigating to a text box hears "edit text". Nothing else. They have no idea what they're supposed to type into it. They cannot fill in your contact form, your checkout form, or your enquiry form.
The fix: Every form field needs a label element that is explicitly associated with the input using a "for" attribute matching the input's ID. Placeholder text alone is not sufficient — it disappears when the user starts typing and isn't reliably read by all screen readers.
Forms are one of the highest-stakes accessibility issues for businesses because they are the mechanism through which customers contact you, buy from you, and sign up with you. An inaccessible form is direct lost revenue.
4. No way to navigate by keyboard
The issue: The website cannot be fully navigated using a keyboard alone — without a mouse or touch screen.
What it means for users: Many users with motor impairments, tremors, or paralysis navigate entirely by keyboard, or use keyboard-based assistive technology like switch access. If your navigation menus, dropdowns, modals, or interactive elements can't be reached or operated by pressing Tab and Enter, these users are completely locked out.
The fix: All interactive elements — links, buttons, form fields, menus, modals — must be reachable and operable by keyboard. There must also be a visible focus indicator: when you press Tab, you should be able to see which element is currently focused. Many websites deliberately remove the default browser focus ring for aesthetic reasons, which is a significant accessibility failure.
Test this yourself: close your mouse, press Tab on your website, and see if you can get to every part of the page. If you can't, neither can users who depend on keyboard navigation.
Test this yourself: close your mouse, press Tab, and see if you can get to every part of the page.
5. Pages with no heading structure
The issue: Page content is not organised using proper heading elements (H1, H2, H3), or headings are used for styling rather than structure.
What it means for users: Screen reader users navigate pages by jumping between headings — it's how they skim and find what they need, just as sighted users scan a page visually. If there are no headings, or if the headings are in the wrong order, this navigation mechanism breaks entirely. A user lands on a long page of content with no way to find what they came for.
The fix: Every page should have exactly one H1 (the main title). Subheadings should use H2. Sub-subheadings should use H3. Don't skip levels (H1 to H3 with no H2). Don't use headings just to make text bigger — use CSS for styling. The heading structure is an outline of the page's content, not a formatting tool.
This is also one of the most significant SEO issues on the list. Search engines use heading structure to understand page content. A page with no H1 or a broken heading hierarchy is harder for Google to index correctly.
What to do next
The five issues above are not exotic edge cases. They are the baseline — the things that come up on almost every site we scan. Getting these right won't make your website perfect, but it will remove the most significant barriers for the most users.
Scan your website free at A11YO. You'll get a plain English report showing exactly which of these issues exist on your site, how many instances were found, and what your developer needs to do to fix each one. No technical knowledge required — it's designed to be read by a business owner and handed straight to a developer.