Accessibility Watch › Data Study
Skincare Brands Online Accessibility: We Tested 3 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 3 skincare brands online to see how the group measures up.
How many skincare brands online pass accessibility checks?
67% failed the automated checks (grade C, D, or F). Of 3 sites scanned: 1 scored an A, 2 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 4.7 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). | 100% |
| A button’s visible text doesn’t match the description it announces to screen readers. | 67% |
| Ensure landmarks are unique | 67% |
| Ensure all ARIA attributes have valid values | 33% |
| Heading levels skip — for example, an H2 jumps directly to an H4 with no H3 between them. | 33% |
| Some images on this page have no description for screen readers. | 33% |
| Some buttons or links are too small to tap reliably on touch screens. | 33% |
| Some images have alt text that duplicates nearby visible text. | 33% |
| The page doesn’t declare what language it’s in. | 33% |
| This page has no ‘main content’ region marked. | 33% |
The most accessible skincare brands online
These scored an A — clean on the high-frequency barriers we grade:
- dermalogica.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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