modul 5 — quality and anti-slop
accessibility and speed: the gates most sites fail
95.9% of the top million home pages carry detectable WCAG failures, and agent-built UI inherits the odds. Two automated gates, axe and Lighthouse budgets, move you into the 4%.
~3 min read · ~9 min with the exercise · v1.1 · verified: 2026-07-15
the base rate is failure
The WebAIM Million, an annual scan of the top million home pages, reported for 2026 that 95.9% of them carry detectable WCAG 2 failures, a number that got worse year over year. The failure list reads like a default agent build: low-contrast text on 83.9% of pages, missing alt text on 53.1%, unlabeled form inputs on 51%. Training data is full of these pages, so unguided generation reproduces them faithfully.
Speed shows the same shape: nothing fails loudly, users just leave. Both qualities share a property that makes them perfect for this module: large parts are machine-checkable, so they belong in gates rather than in your memory.