WCAG 2.2.1
Timing Adjustable
0.5%
of the 609 sites we scanned fail this
Ranging from 0.6% of US local government 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 2.2.1 covers
- We detect this: A meta refresh that reloads or redirects on a timer
- No engine can detect this: Session timeouts with no warning or extensionThe timeout lives on the server. Nothing in the page announces it, so no scan can see it. This is the most common failure of this criterion and it is entirely invisible to automation.
- No engine can detect this: Carousels, countdowns and auto-advancing content with no way to extend the time
Automatic page refreshes can disorient screen reader and keyboard users mid-task.
The fix. Remove the automatic page refresh, or let users control when the page reloads.
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 2.2.1 alongside everything else, with the exact elements that fail.
Run a free scan