WCAG 1.4.1
Use of Color
7.9%
of the 609 sites we scanned fail this
Ranging from 1.3% of Shopify DTC stores to 18% of Indian financial services. 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 1.4.1 covers
- We detect this: Links inside body text distinguished from the surrounding text only by colour
- No engine can detect this: Required fields, errors or statuses indicated only in red or greenThe colour is visible to an engine; the fact that it is the ONLY indicator is not, because the alternative cue might be anywhere on the page.
- No engine can detect this: Chart and graph series distinguished only by colourThis is the most common real-world failure of this criterion and no engine detects any of it.
Of that, one failure is detectable automatically, and these are what the rates on this page measure. Each needs its own fix. The percentage is the share of all 609 scanned sites affected. These do not sum to the 7.9% above: a site can fail more than one of them, and most that fail any fail several.
- Links are shown only by color7.9%
Links distinguished only by color are invisible to color-blind users without additional visual cues.
What it looks like in code
CSS<a href="/path" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Text</a>p a {
color: #0a58ca;
text-decoration: underline;
}Inside a block of text, colour alone is not enough: anyone who cannot distinguish the two hues sees no link at all. An underline is the conventional second cue. A 3:1 contrast against the surrounding text plus a non-colour cue on hover and focus also satisfies the criterion.
Shown for Links are shown only by color. The failing example is real markup from a site in our research cohorts. Class, style and data attributes are removed, and ... marks a value we elided. The structure is unchanged, because the structure is the failure.
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.
Who fails it most3 cuts by state, supervision priority, regulated category
By state
By supervision priority
By regulated category
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
- 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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A free scan reports WCAG 1.4.1 alongside everything else, with the exact elements that fail.
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