Rights and compliance · Feedback latency
Scan for the six failures that account for almost everything
Six mechanical failure categories account for 96% of automatically detectable accessibility errors and have done for seven consecutive years, so a scan wired into the change pipeline addresses the overwhelming bulk of what is detectable at very low cost.
Do this firstEvery change runs the suite before a human looks at it
Low-contrast text, missing image alternatives, unlabelled form fields, empty links, empty buttons, missing document language. That is the list, it has barely moved in seven years, and all six are detectable by a rule engine in under a second.
The first control on the rights-and-compliance sector is deliberately the cheapest one available, for the same reason the first control on adversarial exposure was: the gap here is not knowledge, it is detection. These failures are not subtle and nobody defends them. They persist because nothing in the pipeline looks, and the annual audit that does look is a year out of date the day after it lands.
Route “needs review” results to a person rather than passing them. A rule engine reporting uncertainty is the most useful thing it produces.
The decoy
An annual accessibility audit. It produces a report against a snapshot of a site that has since changed, at a cadence that guarantees every regression ships and lives for up to a year.
Evidence
- The WebAIM Million: An Accessibility Analysis of the Top 1,000,000 Home Pages — II95.9% of one million home pages had automatically detectable WCAG 2 conformance failures, averaging 56.1 errors per page. Six categories account for 96% of all detected errors and have done for seven consecutive years: low-contrast text (83.9% of pages), missing alternative text (53.1%), missing form labels (51%), empty links (46.3%), empty buttons (30.6%), missing document language (13.5%).
Last reviewed 2026-08-19.