I Scanned the Top 100 SaaS Landing Pages for WCAG Violations. Here Are the Results.

I took a list of 102 well-known SaaS products — the tools developers and teams use every day — and ran each landing page through axe-core 4.10, the open-source accessibility testing engine used by Google Lighthouse and Microsoft Accessibility Insights. 87 sites returned valid results. 15 timed out or blocked the scanner.

The scan tests against WCAG 2.2 Level AA — the standard most organizations target for compliance. It checks color contrast, alt text, form labels, ARIA validity, heading structure, keyboard accessibility, and about 80 other rules.

The results are not good. And these are well-funded companies with large engineering teams.

The headline numbers

• 84 of 87 sites (97%) had at least one detectable WCAG violation.
• The average accessibility score was 45.8 out of 100. The median was 41.
• 52 sites (60%)scored below 50 — meaning violation severity outweighed passing checks.
• 39 sites (45%) had at least one criticalviolation — issues that directly block users from completing tasks.
• Only 9 sites (10%) scored 90 or above. Only 3 scored a perfect 100.

For context: automated testing can only detect about 57% of WCAG violations, per Deque's research. These results reflect the detectable subset. The actual accessibility picture is worse.

The best performers

Three sites scored a perfect 100 — zero detectable violations:

Basecamp deserves a callout. They have a public accessibility statement and it shows. Zero violations, 43 passing checks. That's what intentional accessibility work looks like.

The six sites scoring 96 each had exactly one violation — typically a minor heading order or landmark issue. That's the difference between “we thought about accessibility” and “we haven't looked at it.”

The worst performers

A few things stand out. Cloudflare scored a 9. This is a company that runs infrastructure for a significant portion of the internet. Their landing page has 7 violations including missing alt text and insufficient color contrast.

Intercom scored 11. They sell customer communication tools. Their landing page has 7 violations, including elements with ARIA attributes that conflict with their implicit roles. ClickUp scored 10 with 8 violations. These aren't startups scraping by. These are companies with hundreds of engineers.

The scoring methodology weights violations by severity: critical violations count 10x, serious 5x, moderate 2x, minor 1x. So a site with 5 violations can score lower than a site with 8, if those 5 include critical issues. A single “images must have alternative text” failure (critical) impacts the score more than three heading-order warnings (moderate).

The most common violations

Across all 87 sites, I found 370 total violations. Here are the types that appeared most frequently:

Color contrast is still king

47% of sites have insufficient color contrast (WCAG 1.4.3). This matches the WebAIM Million study where contrast has been the #1 failure for five consecutive years. The fix is straightforward — darken your grays, check your brand colors against white backgrounds — but it requires someone to actually check.

Missing alt text persists at scale

18% of sites have images without alt text (WCAG 1.1.1). This is a critical violation. A screen reader encounters these images and either skips them entirely or announces the file name. On sites like Canva and Crowdstrike, decorative images that should have alt="" are missing the attribute entirely, and meaningful images have no description at all.

WCAG 2.2's target-size rule is catching people off guard

18% of sites fail the target-sizecheck — WCAG 2.5.8, which requires interactive touch targets to be at least 24×24 CSS pixels. This is a WCAG 2.2 addition. Most SaaS landing pages were built against 2.1 or earlier and haven't been updated. Small icon buttons, compact navigation links, and tiny social media icons are the typical culprits.

Unlabeled buttons are surprisingly common

15% of siteshave buttons without discernible text (WCAG 4.1.2). These are typically icon-only buttons — hamburger menus, close buttons, social share icons — without aria-labelor visible text. A screen reader user hears “button” with no indication of what it does.

Violations by severity

Of the 370 total violations found across all sites:

56% of all violations are serious or critical. These aren't nitpicks — they're issues that block or significantly impair users who rely on assistive technology. Missing alt text means a blind user doesn't know what an image contains. Missing button labels mean they can't navigate your interface. Insufficient contrast means users with low vision can't read your text.

Score distribution

The distribution skews heavily toward the bottom. 36% of sites scored below 30.These are landing pages with multiple serious or critical violations — sites where a screen reader user would struggle to understand the page at all.

Only 10% scored 90 or above. The gap between the best and worst is enormous. Basecamp's perfect 100 and Crisp's 8 are products in the same industry, at roughly similar scale. The difference is whether someone thought about accessibility.

What this means

A few takeaways from staring at this data.

Company size doesn't predict accessibility. Cloudflare, Salesforce, and Zoom — all public companies with massive engineering teams — scored 9, 32, and 32 respectively. Meanwhile Basecamp, a small team by comparison, scored 100. Budget and headcount don't produce accessible products. Prioritization does.

The most common violations are the easiest to fix. Color contrast, alt text, and button labels are entry-level accessibility work. These aren't complex ARIA patterns or nuanced cognitive accessibility criteria. They're HTML basics that any developer can fix in an afternoon. The fact that 47% of well-funded SaaS landing pages have contrast violations suggests these companies simply aren't checking.

WCAG 2.2 is creating new failures.The target-size rule (2.5.8) appeared on 18% of sites. Most of these landing pages were designed before WCAG 2.2 was published in October 2023. If you're still testing against 2.1, you're missing criteria that are already being referenced in lawsuits.

These are only the automated findings. axe-core catches approximately 57% of WCAG violations. Reading order issues, alt text quality, keyboard interaction patterns, and cognitive accessibility criteria require manual testing. The real accessibility state of these landing pages is worse than these scores suggest.

Methodology

I selected 102 SaaS products based on recognition and category diversity — project management, dev tools, design, marketing, CRM, finance, HR, communication, e-commerce, cloud infrastructure, security, AI, support, and documentation tools. The list is curated, not random: these are tools most developers and teams have heard of.

Each site was scanned by loading the landing page in a headless Chromium browser, waiting 2 seconds for JavaScript to settle, then injecting axe-core 4.10.3 and running a full WCAG 2.2 AA audit. The scanner runs on Modal in isolated containers — each site gets a fresh browser instance.

15 sites either timed out (30-second limit) or returned errors (typically bot detection blocking headless browsers). Those sites are excluded from the results. The scan tested only the landing page — not authenticated flows, subpages, or SPAs.

The scoring formula: score = passes / (passes + weighted_violations) × 100, where critical violations are weighted 10x, serious 5x, moderate 2x, and minor 1x. This means a site with one critical violation scores lower than a site with three minor ones, reflecting the real-world impact on users.

Scans were run on April 5, 2026. Results reflect a point-in-time snapshot. Sites may have changed since scanning.

Check your own site

I built AccessPulse to make this kind of scan trivially easy. Paste a URL, get a WCAG 2.2 report in under 30 seconds. No signup required for a free scan.

If your site is in this list and you want to fix the issues, here's the priority order: critical violations first (alt text, button labels, ARIA validity), then serious (contrast, link names), then moderate (heading order, landmarks). The scan report links each violation to the relevant WCAG success criterion with the specific DOM elements that need fixing.

Run a free scan on your site →

Related reading

• What axe-core actually tests (and misses) — the 57% coverage explained by WCAG principle
• Add WCAG testing to GitHub Actions in 5 minutes — automate these checks in your CI/CD pipeline
• Overlays got fined $1M — why runtime fixes don't solve the violations found in this scan

Frequently asked questions

What percentage of SaaS websites have WCAG violations?

97% of the 87 SaaS landing pages I scanned had at least one WCAG violation. The average accessibility score was 45 out of 100. Only 3 sites (Basecamp, Hootsuite, and Deel) scored a perfect 100.

What are the most common WCAG violations on SaaS websites?

The top violations were: color contrast failures (47% of sites, WCAG 1.4.3), content not contained in landmarks (49%), heading order skipped (41%), links without accessible names (26%), images without alt text (18%, WCAG 1.1.1), and touch targets below the WCAG 2.2 minimum (18%, WCAG 2.5.8).

Does company size predict website accessibility?

No. Cloudflare (public company, large engineering team) scored 9. Basecamp (small team) scored 100. Engineering resources and company size show no correlation with WCAG compliance in this data.

Methodology: 102 SaaS landing pages scanned with axe-core 4.10.3 via headless Chromium. WCAG 2.2 Level AA ruleset. 87 returned valid results. Scanned April 5, 2026. Raw data available on request.