WebAIM added a comparative score (1-10) to their WAVE tool based on the WebAIM Million report. This video explains what these scores actually mean for your website.
The data reveals that 94.8% of homepages have accessibility failures. A score of 5/10 means your site has an average of 51 errors—which represents poor performance. You need a 9.5+ to be doing well.
I demonstrate the score using the WAVE browser extension on real websites and explain why I recommend the extension over the web-based version for more accurate results.
Key takeaways:
- 5/10 = average site with 51 errors per page.
- 9.5+/10 = good accessibility performance.
Transcript
WebAIM has added to their tool a new score. It’s a score as compared to their WebAIM Million report. It’s a comparative score from 1-10, where a five would indicate middle of the road, you’re doing average, compared to the WebAim Million report.
Let’s take a look at the report to get some context around this score. 94.8% of homepages had failures. In order to be doing well, you have to be looking at a comparative score of a 9.5 out of 10 on this new WebAIM score. If you come out at around a 5 out of 10, you’re looking at being an average web page. That means an average of 51 errors per page. That is pretty poor performance.
Now, we’re going to take a look at this WebAIM score on a couple of actual pages so you can see what it looks like. I’m using the WAVE browser extension as I have found it to be much more reliable. If you go to the wave.webaim.org and you just pop the web address in, I have seen it actually introduce a couple of additional errors that don’t exist on the live web page. I always use the browser extension.
Here on the Details tab, it will tell us, Congratulations, no errors were detected, if there weren’t any errors or contrast errors. Then it’ll give you the WebAIM score, in this case, a 9.8 out of 10.
Here’s another site. In this case, we don’t have that introduction with the congratulations. Instead, we go straight to the WebAIM score, and it gives us a 4.6 out of 10. But what it tells us is that they’re doing worse than that midpoint, and that midpoint is a lot of errors and a pretty poor website. That’s how you should take a look at the new WebAIM score if you use the WAVE tool.
I don’t normally recommend using the WAVE tool with clients as it’s just a very complex tool, and you end up with far more questions and far more time trying to explain it than most other tools.