Accessibility Watch › Data Study
Online Mattress Companies Accessibility: We Tested 5 Sites Against WCAG 2.1 AA
Web accessibility is a legal requirement — under the ADA in the U.S. and the European Accessibility Act in the EU. We ran an automated WCAG 2.1 Level AA scan on 5 online mattress companies to see how the group measures up.
How many online mattress companies pass accessibility checks?
60% failed the automated checks (grade C, D, or F). Of 5 sites scanned: 2 scored an A, 3 graded C, 0 graded D, and 0 graded F.
Grades reflect the high-frequency barriers automated scanners most often flag — so an A means a site is clean on those, not that it has zero issues of any kind. Across the full set of WCAG 2.1 AA checks, sites averaged 5.2 types of barrier.
The most common accessibility failures
| Barrier | Share of sites |
|---|---|
| Some content on the page isn’t inside a recognized region (header, nav, main, footer, aside). | 80% |
| Ensure landmarks are unique | 60% |
| A button’s visible text doesn’t match the description it announces to screen readers. | 40% |
| There are multiple footer regions on the page when there should be one. | 40% |
| This page is missing a main heading (H1). | 40% |
| Heading levels skip — for example, an H2 jumps directly to an H4 with no H3 between them. | 40% |
| This page has no ‘main content’ region marked. | 20% |
| Ensure aria-hidden elements are not focusable nor contain focusable elements | 20% |
| Ensure elements with an ARIA role that require child roles contain them | 20% |
| Some links have no readable text — usually icon-only links. | 20% |
The most accessible online mattress companies
These scored an A — clean on the high-frequency barriers we grade:
- mattressfirm.com
- mattresswarehouse.com
Methodology
We scanned each site with axe-core 4.11.4 against WCAG 2.1 Level AA, in its default state, and reported automatically-detectable failures. Automated testing catches a portion of accessibility barriers; full conformance also requires manual and assistive-technology testing. See our methodology for details.
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