The Accessibility Baseline
The WebAIM Million survey tests one million home pages for accessibility compliance every year. The finding is consistent: 96.3% fail. The web is overwhelmingly inaccessible. But within that 96.3%, there's a gradient — and the gradient correlates with framework architecture.
The Framework Architecture Effect
Modern frameworks with semantic HTML defaults — Astro, Next.js with proper head management, Hugo — produce cleaner DOM structures by architecture. The heading hierarchy is enforced by the component model. Alt text is prompted by the image component API. Semantic elements (nav, main, article, aside) are the default, not the exception. The framework nudges developers toward accessible output.
WordPress with plugin-generated markup produces the opposite: nested divs instead of semantic elements, plugin-injected scripts that break focus management, dynamically loaded content that screen readers miss, and accessibility bolt-ons (plugins) rather than built-in semantics. The framework doesn't prevent accessibility — many WordPress sites are accessible through deliberate effort — but the default output is less accessible than modern framework defaults.
The Government Dimension
Government sites face ADA and Section 508 accessibility requirements. Our scan shows 49% of .gov runs Drupal and 24% runs WordPress — both legacy CMS platforms where accessibility depends on theme and plugin choices rather than framework architecture. Modern frameworks make accessible output easier to achieve by default. The government sector, which has the strictest accessibility mandates, runs on infrastructure that makes compliance hardest.
The Unmeasured Gap
Nobody has published a large-scale study correlating framework choice with accessibility compliance rates. The WebAIM Million reports aggregate errors but doesn't segment by framework. Our scan detects frameworks but doesn't test accessibility. The cross-reference doesn't exist yet — but when it does, we expect it to show what architecture already predicts: frameworks with semantic HTML defaults produce fewer accessibility violations than frameworks where semantics are optional. The accessibility case for modern frameworks is there. Nobody is measuring it.
