WCAG 1.4.4
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12.2%
of the 609 sites we scanned fail this
Ranging from 7.6% of US local government 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 1.4.4 covers
- We detect this: A viewport tag that blocks or caps zoom
- No engine can detect this: Layout that breaks when text alone is enlarged to 200%This is the actual requirement, and it is not what we measure. Our reflow check resizes the whole viewport to 320px, which is a related but different test: a page can survive that and still clip text at 200% text-only zoom.
- No engine can detect this: Fixed-height containers that clip enlarged text
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 12.2% above: a site can fail more than one of them, and most that fail any fail several.
- Zooming is disabled on this page12.2%
Users who rely on pinch-to-zoom to enlarge content may be prevented from doing so.
What it looks like in code
HTML<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">Do not set user-scalable=no or a maximum-scale below 5. Blocking zoom makes small text unreadable for anyone who needs to enlarge it.
Shown for Zooming is disabled on this page. Both halves are written rather than harvested: this failure lives in HTML rather than in the markup, so there is no page element to show.
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, country, sector
By state
By country
By sector
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 the numbers do not say
Two of the eight EU countries in the sample have no failures at all: 0 of 15 in Sweden and 0 of 15 in the Netherlands, against 4 of 12 in Ireland. The failing pattern is almost always a viewport tag copied from a template that disabled pinch-zoom to make a site feel more app-like, which stops anyone enlarging text to read it.
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 1.4.4 alongside everything else, with the exact elements that fail.
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