Almost nobody pays attention to web standards anymore
- ID
- 15020
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 18 Aug 2026, 5:35 AM
- Fetched
- 18 Aug 2026, 7:19 AM
- Provider
- The Register
- Category
- technology
- Original URL
- https://www.theregister.com/devops/2026/08/17/almost-nobody-pays-attention-to-web-standards-anymore/5288782
- Source URL
- https://www.theregister.com/headlines.atom
Summary
- Score
- 7.0
- Created
- 18 Aug 2026, 7:20 AM
- Tags
- Audience
- developersvibe_coderssaas_founders
What happened
Independent developer Théo Ducreux's ValidateHTML project crawled the 5,000 most-visited web domains (per the Tranco list) and found 87.2% have at least one HTML spec violation, with only 2.6% returning zero errors and zero best-practice warnings. Over a third failed accessibility checks—20.4% are missing image alt text and 41.6% lack ARIA labels for page regions—making pages broken for screen readers even when they render fine in Chrome.
Why it matters
If you ship web frontends to EU customers, the 2025 European Accessibility Act turns these accessibility failures into legal liability, not just bad practice. Run an HTML validator and an accessibility audit (e.g., axe, Lighthouse) on your pages before your next release—41.6% of top sites missing ARIA labels means your site probably does too.
Discussion angle
How much HTML validation do we actually do in our CI pipelines, and is accessibility compliance a checkbox or a real test we'd fail today?