Visual accessibility spans two related but distinct subjects: clinical vision impairment and the digital barriers that affect people who use visual or nonvisual access tools. WHO estimates that at least 2.2 billion people had near or distance vision impairment in 2020, while WebAIM’s 2024 scan found detectable accessibility errors on 95.9% of one million home pages.
Key Visual Accessibility Statistics
The most broadly useful figures cover global scale, unmet eye-care need, web barriers, and assistive-technology use:
- In the WHO’s 2020 global estimate, at least 2.2 billion people had near or distance vision impairment worldwide.
- In the same 2020 estimate, at least 1 billion people had preventable or unaddressed vision impairment globally.
- In the WHO’s 2020 estimate, cataract accounted for 94 million cases within the preventable or unaddressed distance-vision group worldwide.
- A 2018 modeled estimate cited by WHO put presbyopia-related near-vision impairment at 826 million people globally.
- In 2018 modeling cited by WHO, unaddressed near-vision impairment exceeded 80% in western, eastern, and central sub-Saharan Africa.
- In WHO’s 2023 brief, 90% of unaddressed vision impairment or blindness was concentrated in low- and middle-income countries.
- WHO estimated US$410.7 billion in annual global productivity losses associated with unaddressed vision impairment in 2023.
- WHO estimated US$24.8 billion to address unmet vision-impairment needs globally in its 2023 brief.
- In February 2024, 95.9% of the top one million web home pages had detected WCAG 2 failures in WebAIM’s automated scan.
- In February 2024, 81.0% of scanned home pages had low-contrast text below WCAG 2 AA thresholds.
- In February 2024, 54.5% of scanned home pages had missing alternative text.
- In February 2024, 35.5% of identified form inputs were not properly labeled across the scanned home pages.
- In February 2024, 74.6% of scanned pages used ARIA excluding landmark roles, although presence did not establish correct implementation.
- In WebAIM’s December 2023-January 2024 survey, 71.6% of respondents used more than one desktop or laptop screen reader.
- In that survey, 91.3% of respondents used a screen reader on a mobile device.
- In the same survey, Windows was used with the primary desktop or laptop screen reader by 86.1% of respondents.
Contents
- Global vision impairment scale and unmet need
- Causes, age, and regional patterns
- Eye-care access, costs, and outcomes
- Web accessibility barriers
- Web accessibility structure and ARIA trends
- Screen-reader tools, platforms, and user experience
Global Visual Accessibility Statistics: Scale and Unmet Need
Clinical visual accessibility begins with the number of people whose sight is impaired and the proportion whose needs remain unaddressed. WHO’s global figures describe health status and eye-care need, not the number of people who use digital accessibility features.
- WHO reported at least 2.2 billion people globally with near or distance vision impairment in a 2020 estimate reported in 2025.
- At least 1 billion of those people had preventable vision impairment or impairment that remained unaddressed in the same 2020 estimate.
- WHO says most people with vision impairment and blindness are over age 50, but the cited summary does not give a percentage for that age pattern.
The two headline totals should not be treated as a digital-user count. They measure clinical impairment and unmet care, whereas digital accessibility data measures barriers in websites and software.
Visual Accessibility Data: Causes, Age, and Regional Patterns
The WHO breakdown shows that unaddressed vision loss is not one condition and that near-vision impairment should be kept separate from distance-vision counts.
| Condition or pattern | Estimate | Period and scope |
|---|---|---|
| Cataract | 94 million cases | 2020, global preventable or unaddressed distance-vision group |
| Refractive error | 88.4 million cases | 2020, same WHO group |
| Age-related macular degeneration | 8 million cases | 2020, same WHO group |
| Glaucoma | 7.7 million cases | 2020, same WHO group |
| Diabetic retinopathy | 3.9 million cases | 2020, same WHO group |
| Presbyopia | 826 million people | 2018 modeled near-vision estimate, global |
The condition-specific estimates above come from WHO’s Blindness and vision impairment. The first five rows are within the 1-billion preventable or unaddressed distance-vision group; the presbyopia estimate is a separate modeled near-vision measure.
Regional differences are also substantial. WHO’s 2018 modeled estimates put unaddressed near-vision impairment above 80% in western, eastern, and central sub-Saharan Africa, while the rate was below 10% in high-income North America, Australasia, western Europe, and Asia-Pacific regions.
Visual Accessibility Data: Eye-Care Access, Costs, and Outcomes
Access and economic impact provide a second way to measure the scale of visual impairment. WHO’s 2023 brief estimates that 90% of unaddressed vision impairment or blindness occurs in low- and middle-income countries.
- WHO estimated annual global productivity losses associated with unaddressed vision impairment at US$410.7 billion in 2023.
- WHO estimated the cost of addressing unmet vision-impairment needs at US$24.8 billion globally in 2023.
- A direct comparison of those two WHO estimates gives an approximately 16.6-to-1 ratio of modeled annual productivity loss to estimated intervention cost; this is a derived comparison, not a separate WHO estimate.
- WHO says more than 800 million people need refractive-error services under the SPECS 2030 initiative.
The productivity and intervention figures are economic model estimates, not prices for digital accessibility remediation. They are reported in WHO’s Increasing eye care interventions to address vision impairment, and the 90% share applies to unaddressed impairment or blindness rather than the entire 2.2-billion population.
Web Accessibility Statistics: Contrast, Images, and Forms
WebAIM’s 2024 WebAIM Million report analyzed the top one million home pages with the automated WAVE tool in February 2024. It found 56,791,260 distinct detected accessibility errors, or an average of 56.8 detected errors per home page.
| Detected measure | 2024 result | Scope |
|---|---|---|
| Pages with detected WCAG 2 failures | 95.9% | One million home pages, February 2024 |
| Pages with low-contrast text | 81.0% | Same scan |
| Average low-contrast instances | 34.5 per page | Same scan |
| Pages with missing alternative text | 54.5% | Same scan |
| Inputs not properly labeled | 35.5% | Identified form inputs |
The share of pages with detected WCAG failures fell from 97.8% in 2019 to 95.9% in 2024, but the scan’s detectable-failure measure is not full WCAG conformance. Average detected errors increased 13.6%, from 50 per page in 2023 to 56.8 in 2024, while average low-contrast instances rose 13.7%, from 30.4 to 34.5.
The image results show why markup quality matters alongside visual design. The scan contained more than 55.6 million images, averaging 55.6 per home page; 21.6% lacked alternative text, about 12 images per page on average, and 43% of images missing alternative text were linked images.
Among images that did have alternative text, 14.6% used questionable or repetitive text, including generic, filename-like, duplicate, or adjacent repeated wording. The form-input result measures labeling through label, aria-label, aria-labelledby, or title attributes, not whether the label was understandable in context.
Web Accessibility Trends: Page Structure, Forms, and ARIA
Web pages became structurally denser in the WebAIM sample. The nearly 1.2 billion scanned page elements averaged 1,173 per home page in February 2024, up 11.8% from 1,050 in February 2023 and 50% over the five years to 2024.
The most popular pages were also more complex by this measure: the top 100,000 pages averaged 1,424 elements, compared with 980 in the last 100,000. That 45% difference is an association between popularity segments and DOM size, not evidence that complexity causes accessibility problems.
- 76.7% of scanned pages had at least one region or ARIA landmark in February 2024, while 39.1% had a main element or main landmark.
- The scan detected 89,050,856 ARIA attributes, averaging 89 per page in February 2024.
- ARIA code usage increased 15% in one year and more than quadrupled since 2019, measuring use rather than quality or effectiveness.
- Pages with ARIA averaged 34.2% more detected errors than pages without ARIA; WebAIM cautions that more complex pages may both use more ARIA and have more errors, so this is not causal.
- 6.7% of pages had an ARIA menu, and 28% of those menus introduced barriers through missing markup or interactions.
- 13.2% of pages had ambiguous link text, averaging 6.3 ambiguous links on affected pages.
- 13.3% of pages had a skip link, and one in 10 detected skip links was broken.
These measures come from The WebAIM Million: The 2024 report on the accessibility of the top 1,000,000 home pages. Landmark, ARIA, link, and skip-link presence does not establish that a page is usable or that an implementation is correct.
Visual Accessibility Statistics: Screen-Reader Tools, Platforms, and User Experience
WebAIM’s Screen Reader User Survey #10 collected 1,539 valid responses from self-selected respondents in December 2023-January 2024. Its results describe this survey population, not market share or the prevalence of screen-reader use among the wider population.
| Measure | Result | Survey scope |
|---|---|---|
| Primary desktop/laptop reader: JAWS | 40.5% | WebAIM respondents |
| Primary desktop/laptop reader: NVDA | 37.7% | WebAIM respondents |
| Primary desktop/laptop reader: VoiceOver | 9.7% | WebAIM respondents |
| Commonly used NVDA | 65.6% | Multiple selections allowed |
| Commonly used JAWS | 60.5% | Multiple selections allowed |
| More than one desktop/laptop reader | 71.6% | WebAIM respondents |
| Three or more desktop/laptop readers | 43% | WebAIM respondents |
| Four or more desktop/laptop readers | 17.4% | WebAIM respondents |
Platform use was concentrated but not exclusive. Windows was used with the primary desktop or laptop screen reader by 86.1% of respondents, Chrome was the primary browser for 52.3%, and JAWS with Chrome was the most common screen-reader/browser combination at 24.7%.
Mobile use was widespread in this survey: 91.3% of respondents used a screen reader on a mobile device. The share was 93.6% among respondents with disabilities and 70.4% among respondents without disabilities, while VoiceOver was the primary reader for 8.2% of respondents with disabilities compared with 23.7% of respondents without disabilities.
These findings are reported in WebAIM Screen Reader User Survey #10 Results. The sample was uncontrolled, may not represent all screen-reader users, and questions about commonly used tools allowed multiple selections.