What axe-core finds on real local business sites

The free site audit is not a hypothetical tool. I have run it against 38 real business websites in the Lake Wylie area — restaurants, salons, plumbers, dentists, law firms, marinas, and more. The results are consistent, and they are worse than most of the owners would guess.

The most common violations

Across the 38 sites, axe-core flagged the same categories of WCAG violations over and over. Here is what they are, what they mean, and how often they appeared:

• Color contrast failures — text too light against its background. This is the single most common finding, and it affects every visitor with a visual impairment, not just screen reader users.
• Missing or unhelpful image alt text — images described by a filename or left blank. A screen reader user has no way of knowing what is on the page.
• Links with no discernible text — buttons or icons that are not labeled, so a screen reader announces them as empty.
• Heading hierarchy skips — a page that jumps from an h1 to an h4, skipping h2 and h3. Assistive technology uses heading levels to navigate, and a skip breaks that navigation.
• Form fields without labels — contact forms where the field name is only visible as placeholder text inside the input, which disappears on focus and is not announced to screen readers.
• ARIA hidden elements containing focusable content — interactive elements that are visually hidden from assistive technology but still reachable by keyboard, creating a trap.

What the violation counts look like

The audits show a range. A few sites have zero critical and zero serious violations — usually the ones built on a well-configured modern platform. Most have between 1 and 5 serious violations. Several have 10 or more. The worst had 19 serious violations on a single page, including contrast failures on every text element and a contact form that was entirely invisible to screen readers.

These are not edge cases or theoretical risks. A color contrast failure on a phone number means a customer with low vision cannot read the number to call you. A contact form without labels means a screen reader user cannot fill it out. These are customers trying to give you money who are being blocked by the website.

Why the same violations keep appearing

Most of these sites were built with a website builder — Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy, or a WordPress theme — that gives the owner a drag-and-drop interface and no visibility into accessibility. The builder does not enforce alt text, does not warn about contrast, and does not prevent heading-level skips. The owner is doing their best with the tools they have, and the tools are not good enough.

This is not a criticism of the business owners. It is a criticism of the platforms. When a tool makes it easy to build an inaccessible site and hard to build an accessible one, the result is a lot of inaccessible sites. A custom build where accessibility is checked from the start avoids this entirely.

What the audit costs

Nothing. The free audit runs axe-core and Lighthouse against your site and sends you the results — the violation counts, the specific issues, and what they mean — in plain English. Whether or not you hire me to fix them is up to you, and you keep the report either way.