Impact on website analytics caused by accessibility issues
An interesting result published on the WebAIM website shows that when it comes to WCAG Conformance for the the top 1,000,000 home pages :
97.8% of home pages had detectable WCAG 2 failures! These are only automatically detectable errors that align with WCAG conformance failures with a high level of reliability. Because automatically detectable errors constitute a small portion of all possible WCAG failures, this means that the actual WCAG 2 A/AA conformance level for the home pages for the most commonly accessed web sites is very low, perhaps below 1%.
What is perhaps more surprising is the type of errors that head the top of the list, since many of these can be automatically detected and fixed rather easily, yet the statistics show the percentage of homepages with these issues (in brackets).
- Low contrast text (85.3%)
- Missing alternative text for images (68%)
- Empty links (58.1%)
- Missing form input labels (52.8%)
- Missing document language (33.1%)
- Empty buttons (25%)
With so much testing and analytics being applied these days, and the homepage being such a focus for first-time and returning visitors, is it not possible to detect from the analytics users who are having trouble with the pages due to it being inaccessible? Or do they make up such an insignificant proportion of the users that it is not feasible to make the changes? Or is this not really an accessibility issue?