An element uses a role it isn't allowed to have
23.6%
of the 609 sites we scanned fail this
Ranging from 13.1% of Indian financial services to 30.7% of Shopify DTC stores. Pooled across five targeted cohorts, so treat it as a convenience sample rather than a rate for the web.
What it means and how to fix it
When an element claims a role it can't legitimately have — like a video marked as pure decoration — assistive technologies may announce it incorrectly or hide content users actually need, while the element can still be seen and even focused.
The fix. Remove the disallowed role or replace it with one the element supports; if the element really is decorative, also hide it from assistive technology and keep it out of the tab order.
How often it fails
Share of scanned sites in each cohort. These are five targeted studies, not a random sample of the web, so read the contrast between cohorts rather than any one figure as a web-wide rate.
Who fails it most3 cuts by retail vertical, sector, country
By retail vertical
By sector
By country
Groups smaller than 8 sites are not shown: a rate over a handful of sites moves by tens of points on a single result.
What this does not measureLimits of these figures, and where the corpus came from
- This rule maps to no success criterion, so a site failing it is not failing WCAG. It is still worth fixing: these are the patterns that decide whether assistive technology can navigate a page efficiently rather than merely read it.
- These are five targeted cohorts, not a random sample of the web. Per-cohort rates are the figure to quote; the pooled rate is a convenience sample.
- Denominators count sites that produced a result. Sites that were blocked or errored are excluded rather than counted as passing.
- Occurrence counts are floors: the engine records at most 25 occurrences of a rule per page.
- The EU and Indian cohorts retained only the primary success criterion per finding, so a rule mapping to several criteria contributes to one of them in those two cohorts and to all of them in the other three.
| Cohort | Scanned | Attempted |
|---|---|---|
| Shopify DTC stores | 75 | 75 |
| US local government | 158 | 221 |
| US healthcare providers | 208 | 218 |
| EU e-commerce | 107 | 170 |
| Indian financial services | 61 | 72 |
Corpus generated 2026-09-18.
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