Imagine that your website has a special, terrible filter that makes all of the content unreadable to around 4% of your audience. You could press a button and turn the filter off — would you?
Of course you would! Your goal is to provide a great experience to your users; there’s no defensible reason to shut out a significant portion of your readers.
Unfortunately, many websites have this exact issue — though their designers may be unaware of it. And if you don’t regularly check your content against the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), there’s a very good chance that you’re part of the problem.
Here’s the accessibility issue that could prevent a portion of your audience from reading your website: Low-contrast text.
We know, it’s not particularly exciting. Most people don’t even think about contrast ratios when creating their websites — which is exactly the problem. A 2025 analysis performed by WebAIM (Web Accessibility In Mind) found that 79.1% of the internet’s top 1 million homepages have low-contrast text.
That’s an issue, because about 1 in 12 men have color vision deficiency (CVD, also incorrectly known as color blindness). For people with CVD, low-contrast text may be difficult or impossible to read. The condition is much less common among women, but about 1 in 200 women (0.5%) have some form of CVD.
Assuming that your website targets male and female readers equally, that means that color contrast issues could lock out 4.5% of your audience. If you have a gender-specific product or service, that number could be significantly higher.
Related: Designing for Color Contrast: Guidelines for Accessibility
Color contrast issues get a lot of attention in the accessibility advocacy community for a few reasons: They’re easy to explain, they’re easy to fix, and they help people understand that digital accessibility isn’t just for people who are blind or Deaf.
We’ve got another reason to highlight color contrast (pardon the pun): It shows how ignoring accessibility can be extraordinarily expensive. Changing your website’s color scheme to meet WCAG thresholds should only take a few minutes, provided that you make those changes when building your site. You can easily choose appropriate color-pairs by using free tools such as AudioEye’s Color Contrast Checker.
But if you fail to think about accessibility, you’ll lose readers. You’ll also spend more time fixing issues after the fact; changing the color of your text may be easy, but revising all of your brand logos and promotional materials will cost quite a bit more.
About a billion people worldwide have some form of disability, and that’s not counting people with situational or temporary disabilities — if someone reads your website in bright sunlight, for example, they may have trouble with low-contrast text even if they don’t have CVD.
And while low-contrast text is one of the most common accessibility failures, it’s not the only WCAG violation that can shut out a portion of your audience:
All of these problems can be fixed by following the principles of WCAG. Those principles are also in line with the best practices of web design: They benefit every user, not just small groups of people with specific disabilities.
The bottom line is that if you keep thinking, “we’ll fix web accessibility at some point,” or “accessibility is important, but it’s not our priority right now,” or any variation of those thoughts, it’s time to rethink your approach. Ignoring WCAG will impact your audience, and the longer you wait to adopt an accessible mindset, the greater the impact.
If you’re ready to build an accessibility strategy, we’re here to help. Get started with our free eBook: Developing the Accessibility Mindset. To see how your website stacks up against WCAG standards, start with a free automated analysis powered by AudioEye.