Security· August 17, 2026 at 09:35 p.m.
Nearly 90% of top websites violate web standards, posing accessibility issues
Key takeaways
- Nearly 90% of top websites contain HTML specification violations
- Over a third of sites failed accessibility checks
- Only 2.6% of all sites are completely clean
An independent review of the world's largest websites has revealed that nearly 90 percent of these sites contain HTML specification violations, as per a project by French developer Théo Ducreux. The study examined the contents of the 5,000 most widely used web domains, including Google, YouTube, and EZVIZ's, and found over half served a human-readable home page. However, more than 87 percent of these sites were not serving proper HTML as specified by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the WHATWG. The study identified over 100,000 HTML violations across all sites, with only 2.6 percent returning zero errors and zero best-practice warnings. Additionally, over a third of sites failed accessibility checks, potentially leaving screen readers struggling to convey the page's structure.
