Where Accessibility Barriers Cluster on Typical Websites

When residents hit a roadblock online, it rarely happens by accident. Over the past three months, Esther found that exposure is not scattered at random across websites. It clusters in four clear patterns: visibility, structure, clarity, and navigation. This article lays out where those patterns land, with the city website as an example everyone can translate for their own organization.

On a typical city website assessed during this window (July 16 to October 13, 2026), digital risk clustered around a few repeat patterns. The evidence shows most barriers are not isolated bugs, but surface in the same categories across nearly every site measured.

Patterns, not random faults: where the risk sits

Visibility sits at the top. In the last 90 days, 98% of sites assessed carried text contrast below the required ratio: meaning the text was too faint to read comfortably. Anyone with low vision, and anyone using a device outdoors, meets this barrier before they click anything else. For many, it's the wall before they even step inside.

Structure appears just behind. On 95% of sites, menus and controls built without proper names or states mean that someone using a screen reader has no way to operate them. For a resident trying to book a class, schedule a pickup, or pay a bill, the page may be visually there but inaccessible in practice.

Clarity and navigation matter too, but they cluster in predictable places. Form fields without labels appeared on 82% of sites. The unlabeled fields either used nothing but the gray hint text (which disappears as soon as you type) or left a person using voice or screen input to guess what goes in the box. Navigation issues, like a visible focus indicator being hidden behind banners or sticky headers, landed on 73% of sites: often on the pages set up as service portals, not information pages.

On the ground, the evidence looks like this:

• A typical site carried 1,210 barriers, but these reduced to just 33 distinct changes: a smaller number than most expect.
• These barriers affected only five main pages on a median site, reflecting that exposure clusters in key service points rather than across every page.
• Visibility accounted for the most widespread single barrier; structure issues were next, but both patterns showed up in nearly every site.

Why it matters: digital exposure is rarely spread thin

The reality for any city or organization: exposure is not a needle-in-a-haystack search. The vast majority of risk sits in a handful of common places: a few key pages, and a handful of patterns. That shapes both how you manage risk and how you plan the work to resolve it.

Visibility, structure, clarity, and navigation barriers have real stakes: a parent using a phone in bright sunlight may not see a "submit" button; a resident using a screen reader may reach a menu that says nothing; a user may abandon a form that asks for information without labeling what goes where. Each one is an interruption in service delivery.

What to look for on your own site

Where to begin is not a list to memorize, but a map to check against your own services. Ask of your own site:

• Can the key pages (home, forms, and key service flows) be read in sunlight or by someone with low vision?
• Do all menus, dialogs, and buttons announce what they are for someone using a screen reader?
• Does every form field carry a label that stays visible and can be filled by speech or autofill?
• On every key page, is the visible focus (what someone using a keyboard sees) never hidden behind any banner or overlay?

A “no” to any question above names where exposure sits on your own map.

For more detail on the work behind each number, see How much work is it to fix website accessibility? and Who is affected by inaccessible government websites?. For what this means for a public body, see For government. For a private organization, see For business. For an overview, start at ADA Compliance.