Wagtail accessibility statistics for GAAD 2025
As part of #GAAD, here are our updated accessibility statistics from Wagtail sites
Just like for Global Accessibility Awareness Day in 2024, here are statistics about the accessibility of sites built with Wagtail! This yearly event is a good opportunity for us to report on the trends we’re observing, good and bad.
Wagtail sites with no accessibility issues
Aim higher with all things accessibility. We see a decrease in the percentage of sites with no detected issues this year, even though the absolute number of sites is increasing. There are more and more Wagtail sites out there, and the quality is uneven!
In 2025, we found 3.80% had no detected issues, compared to 4.77% in 2024,4.44% 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.
Government websites
Following the lead of the 2024 Web Almanac, we thought it would be interesting to look into the accessibility scores of government websites built with Wagtail!
Of 196 websites present in this shortlist, the highest average scores are for the United Kingdom and France. Excluding subdomains to avoid one site being counted multiple times, the two countries are head to head at an average score of 98.4! Those two scores are likely much higher than sites in other nations because of how accessible the design systems of France and of the UK are. In particular, the French government has an official Wagtail integration of their design system.
Here is how other countries fare:
- 🇬🇧 United Kingdom: 99
- 🇫🇷 France: 98
- 🇳🇿 New Zealand: 93
- 🇺🇸 United States: 92
- 🇦🇺 Australia: 91
- 🇹🇳 Tunisia: 89
- 🇨🇾 Cyprus: 89
- 🇵🇱 Poland: 87
- 🇮🇪 Ireland: 87
- 🇨🇴 Colombia: 83
- 🇺🇦 Ukraine: 82
- 🇲🇽 Mexico: 79
- 🇮🇳 India: 77
- 🇮🇩 Indonesia: 77
- 🇻🇳 Vietnam: 76
Legal requirements
Pictured in this map, 41 countries around the world have legal requirements relating to accessibility. In Europe, in June 2025, the European Accessibility Act will come into force, bringing new requirements to a range of products and services: smartphones, ticketing machines, streaming services, transportation, banking, e-commerce, etc. In this context, it makes a lot of sense that government websites are more accessible! It’s the right thing to do for all sites, but strong legal frameworks do help.
Success rate of Wagtail built-in checks
Over the years, we see good progress on all five common issues detectable with our built-in checker:
- button-name: 66% of Wagtail sites pass this, down from 70% in 2024, and 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.
- image-alt: we introduced this check in 2025, and currently 74% of site homepages pass this, a sharp increase compared to past years. There is a lot of improvements to be made to alt text across the web, and since image accessibility improvements in Wagtail 6.3, no reason for Wagtail sites not to get perfect scores.
- link-name: 41% passing, slightly down from 42% in 2024 (38% in 2023). Just like button-name, one of the page’s links is missing its title.
- heading-order: 53% passing, increasing slightly from 51% in 2024 (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: 61% of sites passing, increasing from 55% in 2024 (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! There are a few decreases to keep an eye on, possibly by further tailoring our checks, or providing auto-fixes. We’re looking for sponsorships for related SEO quality assurance, that could also directly apply to accessibility checks.
Alt text quality
With the introduction of new alt text quality checks for Wagtail images, we thought it interesting to report on all patterns considered so far.
- Likely file name: 12.2%. An editor uses the file name as the alt text.
- Bug (None, img, alt): 0.6%. Likely developer mistakes.
- Generic word: 1.0%. For example "image" or "photo", with no further information.
- Punctuation only: 1.4%. For example "#" or "'".
- 1-5 characters: 8.0%. For example "123".
- One word: 40.4%. This can be appropriate in specific contexts, but is often not descriptive enough.
There is a high likelihood we will introduce checks for more of those patterns in the future.
Data and methodology
The data we use comes from a dataset of the world’s top 15M website homepages: HTTP Archive. 6,000+ 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. The filtered data is available in Google Sheets: Wagtail sites accessibility GAAD 2025 - Data.
Support our work
If you think there is room for Wagtail to do more in this space, consider joining our accessibility team, or look into our feature sponsorship opportunities!
