WebAIM Million, 2026: 94.8% of the top million home pages contain detectable accessibility failures. Pages using ARIA average 59.1 errors. Pages without it average 42.
That inversion tells you everything. ARIA lets developers declare accessibility intent. A developer adds a role attribute, nothing visibly breaks, they move on. The screen reader user who hits the wall has no channel back to the person who built it. Twenty-five years of that silence, and the remedy has quietly become the mask.