WCAG 1.3.5
Identify Input Purpose
0.7%
of the 609 sites we scanned fail this
Ranging from 0.9% of EU e-commerce to 1.3% 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
What 1.3.5 covers
- Partly detected: An autocomplete value that is not a valid tokenWe detect an autocomplete attribute whose value is misspelled or not in the spec. This is the only part of the criterion any engine checks.
- No engine can detect this: Fields that should carry autocomplete but have noneKnowing that an input collects a postal code, rather than any other short string, means understanding the form. A name field with no autocomplete is indistinguishable from a search box.
Assistive technologies may fail to auto-fill form fields, adding friction for users with cognitive or motor disabilities.
The fix. Tell each field what kind of information it expects (name, email, phone, etc.) so browsers and assistive tech can auto-fill it.
For what the criterion formally requires, read the W3C Understanding document.
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.
What this does not measureLimits of these figures, and where the corpus came from
- 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.
Check your own site
A free scan reports WCAG 1.3.5 alongside everything else, with the exact elements that fail.
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