We read 570 new AI-tool homepages. 1 in 5 fails a basic accessibility check.
On 12 October 2026 we fetched the homepages of 602 AI tools that their makers had recently listed on a directory, and read the raw HTML for three mistakes that need no judgment call to spot. Of the 570 pages we could read, 106 (18.6%) failed at least one.
The three checks
- A link or button with no text a screen reader can announce: an icon-only control with no
aria-label, notitleand no visually hidden text. - An
<img>with noaltattribute at all. An emptyalt=""on a decorative image is correct and was not counted. - No
langattribute on the<html>element.
All three are WCAG 2.x Level A failures (4.1.2 Name, Role, Value and 2.4.4 Link Purpose; 1.1.1 Non-text Content; 3.1.1 Language of Page). None of them depends on how a page looks.
What came back
| Measure | Homepages | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Homepages fetched | 602 | AI tools recently listed by their makers on a directory |
| JavaScript shells | 32 (5%) | the server sent no readable content to check |
| Readable homepages | 570 | the denominator for everything below |
| Failed at least one check | 106 (18.6%) | about 1 in 5 |
| Unnamed icon-only link or button | 88 | the most common failure by far |
| Image with no alt attribute | 27 | from one stray image up to 120 of 120 |
| Failed both | 9 | |
| Missing <html lang> | 0 | templates handle this one for you |
The unnamed control is usually the hamburger menu, a social icon in the footer, or a "copy" or "close" button. The missing alt text was uneven: on some sites one stray image, on others nearly all of them (120 of 120 images on one homepage, 64 of 65 on another).
This is a floor, not a score. A raw-HTML read can't see colour contrast, focus order, keyboard traps, or anything a script injects after load. A rendered audit of the same pages finds more. For scale, the WebAIM Million 2025 found detectable failures on 94.8% of the top million homepages with a rendered checker.
Why a maker should care
A screen reader announces an unlabeled hamburger button as just "button". The visitor can't open your navigation, so they can't reach your pricing page. If you sell into the EU, the European Accessibility Act has applied to many consumer-facing digital services since 28 June 2025. In the US, website accessibility claims under the ADA are still filed every year.
The fixes take minutes
- Icon-only controls: add
aria-label="Open menu"(or "Copy link", "Close") to the<button>or<a>. If the icon is an SVG inside a labeled control, addaria-hidden="true"to the SVG. - Images: give every content image an alt that says what it shows. Give decorative images
alt=""so screen readers skip them instead of reading the file name.
You don't need a tool for either. If you want to see what a rendered audit finds on your own site, our free WCAG scan does one page with no signup, and the $29/mo plan re-checks the site daily so a deploy can't quietly bring a failure back.
Method
One plain HTTP fetch of each homepage on 2026-10-12, no JavaScript run. A site counts as failing a check if its served HTML has at least one instance. The 602 sites are AI tools listed by their makers on AISOTools, which shares an operator with RatedWithAI. We are not naming the sites; the makers whose pages failed got a private note about their specific issue. Form-label findings were left out on purpose, because CSS-hidden inputs produce false positives in a static read.