WCAG 2.4.1
Bypass Blocks
22.7%
of the 609 sites we scanned fail this
Ranging from 3.8% of US local government to 56.1% of EU e-commerce. 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 2.4.1 covers
- We detect this: No skip link on the page at all
- We detect this: A skip link that exists but points at a missing or unfocusable targetWorth separating, because a broken skip link looks correct in the markup and fails in use.
- Partly detected: Landmarks used as the bypass mechanism instead of a skip linkLandmark structure is checked, but as best practice rather than against this criterion. A page with clean landmarks and no skip link can satisfy the criterion in ways we report separately.
- No engine can detect this: Whether the block being bypassed is genuinely repeated across pagesThe criterion applies to blocks repeated on multiple pages. A single-page scan cannot establish repetition.
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 22.7% above: a site can fail more than one of them, and most that fail any fail several.
- There's no way to skip repeated navigation22.7%
Keyboard-only users must tab through all navigation on every page without a skip link.
What it looks like in code
HTML<body>
<header>
<nav><!-- 40 links, tabbed through on every single page load --></nav>
</header>
<main>
<h1>Page title</h1>
</main>
</body><body>
<a href="#main" class="skip-link">Skip to main content</a>
<header>
<nav><!-- same 40 links, now skippable --></nav>
</header>
<main id="main" tabindex="-1">
<h1>Page title</h1>
</main>
</body>The link may be visually hidden until focused, but it must be the first thing in the tab order and its target must be able to receive focus. tabindex="-1" on the target is what makes the jump actually move focus rather than only scroll.
Shown for There's no way to skip repeated navigation. 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 sector, country, state
By sector
By country
By state
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
The one criterion where EU retailers fail worse than every other cohort, driven almost entirely by banking sites. A missing skip link is trivial to add and costs a keyboard user the entire navigation block on every page load, which on a banking site is a long one.
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 2.4.1 alongside everything else, with the exact elements that fail.
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