The six checks behind most of it
We measured 1,182 pages across thirteen public Confluence sites against WCAG 2.2. Six checks accounted for most of what failed. None of the six needs a specialist to spot, and none needs a redesign to fix. If your space fails on all of them, it is not badly built — it is unmeasured.
Updated 7 October 2026. An earlier version of this guide listed bare URLs, a second H1 and skipped heading levels among the six. None of them fails WCAG on its own, and all three are now covered at the end as advice. The figures below come from the recount described in the study.
Why these six
They are the failures that come from writing for how a page looks rather than how it is structured: an image dropped in without a description, a heading made by bolding a line, a link that says “click here”. Each is easy to make hundreds of times without noticing, and each is easy for a machine to find — which is what makes the problem tractable rather than daunting.
1. Image has no alternative text
The most widespread certain failure: 1,474 issues, on 285 of the 1,182 pages and twelve of the thirteen sites. In documentation the screenshot is often the instruction, so a missing description removes the step, not a decoration.
In the Cloud editor, click the image and use the alt text field in the toolbar. Describe what the reader needs to do, not what the picture is: the setting and its value, not “screenshot of the settings page”. An image that carries no information — a purely decorative divider — should be marked decorative so the reader skips it cleanly. This one needs a written policy, because it is a habit across every author.
2. Text contrast below the AA minimum
1,396 issues — and they sat on just 114 pages. That concentration is the good news. It is almost always one template, one panel style, or one brand grey, chosen once and repeated. You change the value, not 114 pages.
Body text needs a contrast ratio of at least 4.5 to 1 against its background; large text needs 3 to 1. The usual culprits are light grey captions, coloured text in panels, and status text that leans on a pale colour. Fix the source style and the whole set clears at once.
3. Bold text used instead of a heading
461 issues on 146 pages. A bold line with a paragraph under it looks like a heading and is not one. A screen reader cannot list it, cannot jump to it, and announces it as ordinary text, so the reader loses the structure a sighted reader sees at a glance. This one is reported for a person to confirm, because a short bold line is sometimes just emphasis.
If a line names a section, make it a real heading at the right level. Reserve bold for emphasis inside a sentence. This is a five-second change per instance and it restores the page’s table of contents.
4. Alternative text that does not describe the image
258 issues — and the one people do not expect. Here the field was filled in, and the information is still gone: a filename, the word “image”, or the caption from the paragraph above repeated verbatim.
This one is slower to fix than plain missing alt text, because it is not a policy gap. It is authors not yet knowing what the field is for. The check to teach: delete the image in your head, read only the alt text, and ask whether the reader can still do what the page is teaching.
5. Link text that does not say where it goes
59 issues on 41 pages, across eleven of the thirteen sites. “Click here”, “more” and “this page” tell a listener nothing when links are read out as a list. WCAG allows the surrounding sentence to explain a link, so these are reported for a person to confirm rather than as certain failures.
Make the link text the name of the destination: “the 2026 onboarding checklist”, not “click here”. The test: the link should make sense read on its own.
6. Data table with no header row
58 issues on 44 pages, on twelve of the thirteen sites. Without header cells a screen reader reads a grid of values with no way to tell which column each one belongs to. A table used only to place images side by side is layout, not data, and is not counted here.
Select the first row and turn on “Header row” in the table toolbar. If the table only arranges content, use a page layout with columns instead.
Three common habits that are advice, not failures
Bare URLs as link text were the most frequent finding of all: 846 on 293 pages, on every site. A URL names its own destination, so it does not fail WCAG, but a long one is read aloud character by character. Where you can, link a short name instead.
An H1 inside the page body appeared 636 times on 178 pages. Confluence already uses the page title as the H1, so a second one is untidy rather than a barrier.
Skipped heading levels appeared 137 times on 76 pages, on every site. WCAG does not require levels to run in sequence, but an outline that jumps from Heading 2 to Heading 4 is harder to follow. Start body headings at Heading 2 and nest one level at a time.
The order to work in
Contrast first, because it is one change for a large count. Then the two alt-text checks, missing before inadequate, since the first needs a rule and the second needs a short piece of training. Then headings and tables, which authors fix with the editor toolbar in one pass. Vague links and bare URLs can be cleaned continuously by whoever edits a page next.
Measure before and after. “We ran an audit” is not evidence; a dated count over the whole space, moving in the right direction, is.