Wagtail accessibility statistics for GAAD 2024
As part of #GAAD, this week we’re sharing accessibility stats & tips from Wagtail sites
Just like for Global Accessibility Awareness Day in 2023, here are statistics about the accessibility of sites built with Wagtail.
Python websites accessibility scores
We saw a downwards trend compared to last year’s score, but Wagtail websites are still leading on accessibility in the Python ecosystem:
This shows the mean accessibility score of Wagtail sites over time, compared to other Python technologies. Wagtail sites are consistently doing better – but only just (84 in April 2024, 85 in April 2023 – still above the 81 average for Django sites).
With appropriate targets and ongoing testing, there is no reason all sites couldn’t score a perfect "100" (no issues detected) on those tests.
Data for this chart is from the Core Web Vitals Technology Report.
Wagtail sites with no accessibility issues
Aim higher with all things accessibility. Wagtail sites are doing better year over year, but there’s still lots to do:
In 2024, we found 4.77% of Wagtail sites had no issues detected, compared to 4.44% in 2023 and 3.83% in 2022. Those numbers are above industry averages but nowhere near our ambitions.
All sites could score a perfect "0 errors" detected - and then further spend time on manual tests which can also uncover fundamental issues.
We hope our commitment to the ATAG 2.0 standard will help all Wagtail sites get there, with tools like our accessibility checker paving the way.
Here is the data for this graph: LH scores 2024-04-01, current dataset.
Success rate of Wagtail built-in checks
We see great progress on all four common issues detectable with our built-in checker:
- button-name: 70% of Wagtail sites pass this, compared to 65% in 2023. A button element on the page is lacking a label. This is entirely detectable with automated tests such as those featured in our built-in accessibility checker, built on Axe.
- link-name: 42% passing (38% in 2023). Just like button-name, one of the page’s links is missing its title.
- heading-order: 51% passing (50% in 2023). Some heading levels are getting skipped on the page – always have a main heading (h1) followed by subheadings (h2, h3, etc.).
- frame-title: 55% of sites passing (50% in 2023). A frame (such as an embedded video) is missing its title. Again entirely detectable with automated tests – and very simple to fix once identified!
It’s very encouraging how our built-in checks have resulted in tangible improvements! We’re now looking for a financial sponsorship to take this even further, and introduce more automated and manual accessibility checks.
Here is the data for this graph: LH checks 2024-04-01.
Wagtail AI vs. existing alt text quality
The Wagtail accessibility team found AI to be very promising for alt text, with consistently better quality than Wagtail sites are achieving currently:
The team compared the alt text of real-world Wagtail images, with results generated by GPT-4 Vision. For 89% of images, the AI alt text was better than average; compared to 43% for the existing alt text.
This is tremendously promising and we hope to deliver those Wagtail AI improvements for all Wagtail websites in the near future, starting with a Google Summer of Code 2024 internship.
Here is the data for this graph: Wagtail images alt text 2024 review.
Data and methodology
The data we use comes from a dataset of the world’s top 15M website homepages: HTTP Archive. 4,000+ websites in this dataset are identified as using Wagtail.
From this dataset, we then extract specific statistics following the methodology of the HTTP Archive Web Almanac’s accessibility chapter – but filtering to only assess Wagtail projects.
