We checked the homepages of 324 towns in August. We were braced for a hundred different problems. We found about ten, over and over, almost everywhere.
Text nobody can read against the color behind it. That was the big one, by a distance. Links that are just a little icon, so a screen reader announces "link" and stops there. Buttons in the same state. Photos with no description. Pages that never say what language they are written in. Lists that look like lists but are not. And somebody else's widget dropped into the page, bringing its own problems with it.
Nobody was being careless
That is the bit worth sitting with.
Not one of those took a hard decision to get wrong. Somebody picked a color they liked. Somebody added an icon and did not label it. Somebody pasted in code a vendor had emailed over. Somebody uploaded a photo at a quarter to five on a Friday.
These are not failures of care. The software allowed it, so eventually it happened, because the person doing it has forty other things on and no way of knowing that this particular click was the one that mattered.
Which is why "train the staff" does not work
The standard answer to a list like this is a training day and a checklist.
We think that answer is close to useless, and 324 town websites are the evidence. The person looking after a small town's website is usually the Clerk, and their real job is vital records, licensing, elections and minutes. The website gets a couple of hours a month. A checklist is competing for attention with an election.
Software that needs somebody to stay vigilant forever, when they have no attention spare, will produce this exact list of problems every time. It is producing it right now, on thousands of sites.
So take the permission away
Nearly everything on that list disappears if the software simply cannot do it.
If there is no free color picker, and the palette gets checked before anyone is offered it, the biggest category is gone. If nobody is hand-writing the underlying code, four more have nowhere to come from. If a link or a photo without a description will not publish, that is two more. If the page language is built in rather than typed into a template once in 2011 and forgotten about, that is another.
Not because we are more careful than the people who built the other platforms. Because we decided not to offer the choices that go wrong.
What this does not tell you
Two things.
We only looked at homepages. Everything we know says the interior pages, the forms and the documents are worse. We did not test them, so we are not going to quote you a number about them.
And an automated check only catches part of what matters. No tool can tell you whether your plain-language summary is actually plainer, or whether your headings describe what is underneath them. Anyone selling you a green score as proof you are fine is selling you a green score.
We will write up the interior pages when we have done the work, including whatever goes badly.