The most common barriers on German websites, measured instead of guessed
We tested 14,984 German business websites. The ranking of the most common barriers looks different from what most lists claim.
There is no shortage of lists naming the most common accessibility barriers. They usually mention contrast, alt text and keyboard operation, in varying order, and none of them says where that order comes from. So we measured: 14,984 home pages of German businesses, tested automatically against nine criteria that can be determined unambiguously by machine.
The result is different from what we expected, and the single most common barrier appears on none of the usual lists.
98 percent of pages have no skip link
A skip link is one link at the very top of the source that leads straight to the main content. It stays invisible until someone presses Tab. Without it, anyone operating without a mouse works through the entire menu again on every single subpage before the actual text begins.
It is missing on 14,678 of the pages we tested. That makes it by far the most common barrier and at the same time the cheapest fix: ten lines of HTML and CSS, added once, done for the whole site.
Almost half do not mark up their main content
47.3 percent of pages have no designated main content region. For a screen reader the page becomes one continuous stream of text: there is nowhere to jump to, because nothing states technically where the content starts.
The differences between systems are large here and follow no simple rule. On Jimdo pages the region is missing in 88 percent of cases, on Wix in only 4 percent. That is almost always the default theme rather than the operator.
Almost one in three pages has no main heading
29.4 percent get by without a main heading. It answers what a page is even about and is the first thing a screen reader announces. Search engines evaluate it too, so this gives away two things at once. On Shopware shops it is missing from 54 percent of the pages we tested.
Images without alt text, especially in shops
16.7 percent of pages serve images without alt text. For blind visitors those images simply do not exist. On Shopware shops the figure rises to 33 percent, exactly where product photos are meant to drive the sale.
One in six pages blocks zoom on mobile
16.6 percent forbid pinch to zoom. On WooCommerce shops it is 36 percent. Anyone who needs reading glasses and wants to order on their phone cannot get at the ingredients list or the shipping costs. The cause is usually a single line that arrived with the theme.
What the figures mean in practice
Out of 14,984 websites tested, exactly 111 had no findings at all. That is 0.7 percent. All the others had at least one barrier, on average 2.3 per page. So the backlog is industry-wide, and that is the genuinely good news: anyone starting today is ahead of almost everyone else after the first few fixes.
One caveat belongs here. This survey is not a full test against the European requirements. Contrast, detailed keyboard operation, focus order and comprehensibility cannot be measured automatically. So the real number of barriers is higher than these figures, not lower.