The Costliest Barrier Mistakes: Where Companies Should Start First

We already put together an overview of common barriers and their solutions in our knowledge section, including concrete examples for alt text, keyboard accessibility, contrast, and forms. This article picks up where that overview leaves off and answers the question of sequence, based on concrete frequency and risk data rather than gut feeling or the random order of a checklist.

Why prioritization is necessary in the first place

Not every barrier carries the same weight. Some affect nearly every page of a website and can be fixed in a few hours, others sit deep inside a custom-built widget and require weeks of development work. Without prioritization, teams often end up doing the opposite of what makes sense, grinding away at one resource-intensive barrier while ten easily fixable issues with far greater reach sit untouched.

For legal compliance under the European Accessibility Act and Germany's BFSG, WCAG Level AA is what matters, not the voluntary Level AAA. When prioritizing, all AA criteria under WCAG 2.2 should be covered first, before resources go toward further AAA measures that are desirable but not legally required.

The most common failures according to WebAIM Million 2026

The WebAIM Million Report 2026, an annual analysis of one million homepages worldwide, provides a solid basis for that sequence. 95.9 percent of the homepages examined have at least one detectable WCAG failure. Six error categories stand out and together account for roughly 96 percent of all detected issues:

• ✓ Insufficient contrast, affecting 83.9 percent of homepages
• ✓ Missing alt text, affecting 53.1 percent
• ✓ Missing form labels, affecting 51 percent
• ✓ Empty links, affecting 46.3 percent
• ✓ Empty buttons, affecting 30.6 percent

This order is not a coincidence, it roughly mirrors how often a mistake gets overlooked technically, not how severely it affects a given individual. Still, it is a solid starting point, since what shows up most often tends to affect the most people who rely on assistive technology. It is also worth noting that the first two categories, contrast and alt text, usually get fixed without deep changes to existing code, while empty links and buttons more often point to structural front-end issues that need closer coordination with development.

A simple grid: reach against effort

In practice, a simple grid works well for sorting barriers along two axes, how many pages and users are affected, and how much effort the fix requires. This grid does not replace a full audit, but it turns a long list of errors into a sensible order within minutes, before development resources even get allocated.

• ✓ Quick wins, wide reach, low effort, this almost always includes contrast values and missing alt text, often fixable site-wide through a central color scheme or CMS field
• ✓ Must-fix projects, wide reach, high effort, such as keyboard accessibility for custom-built menus or forms, resource-intensive but unavoidable given the reach
• ✓ Planned initiatives, narrower reach, high effort, such as captions for a large video archive, best scheduled deliberately rather than tackled spontaneously
• ✓ Handle along the way, narrower reach, low effort, such as the lang attribute on individual foreign-language passages, easy to fix whenever the code is already being touched

A quick look at your own contrast checker value is often enough to spot the first quick win, before a full scan even runs. In practice, working through the grid top to bottom tends to work well, tackle the quick wins within days, plan the must-fix projects in terms of scope and timeline in parallel, schedule the planned initiatives, and fold the handle-along-the-way items into whatever code changes are already underway. This sequence delivers visible progress quickly, which is often what keeps an accessibility project supported internally instead of stalling after the first resource-intensive task.

It matters to apply this grid more than once. New content, new campaign pages, or a relaunch of individual components tend to reintroduce familiar failure types, usually contrast or missing alt text again. Recurring checks prevent categories that were already fixed from quietly creeping back in.

Legal risk as an added factor

Reach and effort are not the only criteria. Some barriers show up disproportionately often in warning letters, because they are easy to prove with a simple automated scan, above all missing contrast and missing alt text. A barrier that is both common and easy to prove should move up the list regardless of pure effort.

Since January 2026, civil warning letters from competitors or associations in Germany have been joined by official market surveillance, carrying its own fine risk independent of any private legal action. For prioritization, that means easily found and easily proven barriers are no longer just a reputational risk, they are a regulatory one too.

How SiteCockpit helps with prioritization

easyMonitoring handles this ranking automatically, every barrier it finds comes back sorted by urgency, so teams do not have to build their own grid first and can start directly with the quick wins that carry the most weight. This way, making a website accessible does not mean getting lost in an unsorted list of a hundred individual errors, or having to make every prioritization call by hand.

Once the sequence is set, our article Achieving WCAG Compliance Step by Step helps with the actual implementation, from analysis through team training. And if the perceived cost of accessibility work is still holding a project back, these 5 accessibility myths are costing your company money makes the case for starting with the quick wins instead of postponing the whole project out of respect for its harder parts.