vital-scans open quality ledger

www.cdc.gov: week 2026-W38

This is the 2026-W38 ISO-week report (1858 pages fetched, 1663 unique pages audited by axe/Alfa). Generated 2026-09-30. Compared against 2026-W37 (3330 fetched). The dashboard headline uses a rolling last-7-days window; this page is the full ISO week. Machine-readable API: snapshot.json · findings.json.

Primary standards queue: 0 required finding type(s) (handling: report). Verification queue: 35 required finding type(s) (handling: review). Aspirational queue: 0 finding type(s). Advisory queue: 0 finding type(s). Unmapped review queue: 17 finding type(s).

New this week
0
Fixed this week
0
Regressed this week
9

Fix these first

Highest-leverage issues, ranked by pages affected × severity × people reached. Fixing a shared component often clears many pages at once. Issue links go to the full bug detail on the Accessibility page.

Top 8 issues to prioritize this week.
IssueSeverityPagesWho it affectsHow to fixEvidence
All page content should be contained by landmarks (WCAG criterion undetermined) (rule↗) Serious 1662 — Wrap all page content in landmarks (header, nav, main, footer) so users can navigate by region. pages (CSV)
Images must have alternative text (WCAG 1.1.1) (rule↗) Critical 330 Without vision, Limited vision Give every <img> a meaningful alt attribute. Use alt="" only for decorative images so screen readers skip them. pages (CSV)
<html> element must have a lang attribute (WCAG 3.1.1) (rule↗) Serious 334 Without vision, Limited cognitive, language, or learning ability Add a lang attribute to <html> (e.g. lang="en"). pages (CSV)
Landmarks should have a unique role or role/label/title (i.e. accessible name) c (WCAG criterion undetermined) (rule↗) Moderate 518 — When a landmark role/type repeats (e.g. two <nav>s), give each a distinct accessible name with aria-label or aria-labelledby (e.g. "Primary" and "Footer" navigation) so screen-reader users can tell them apart. pages (CSV)
Heading levels should only increase by one (WCAG criterion undetermined) (rule↗) Moderate 504 — Use heading levels in order (h1 → h2 → h3) without skipping; structure, not size. pages (CSV)
Elements must meet minimum color contrast ratio thresholds (WCAG 1.4.3) (rule↗) Serious 322 Limited vision, Without color perception Increase the contrast between text and its background to at least 4.5:1 (3:1 for large text). Check both light and dark modes. pages (CSV)
Document should have one main landmark (WCAG criterion undetermined) (rule↗) Moderate 458 — Each page should have exactly one <main> landmark. pages (CSV)
Target size is at least 44×44 CSS pixels (Enhanced) (WCAG 2.5.5) (rule↗) Moderate 432 — See remediation guidance: https://alfa.siteimprove.com/rules/sia-r111 pages (CSV)

Progress

Open findings by severity over 15 weeks (lower is better)
Critical Serious Moderate Minor W24W31W38530

Dropped from this week's sample

These stopped appearing in scan results, but their pages were not re-checked this week — this is not a confirmed fix.

This week at a glance 75 issue type(s)
Median axe violations / page
5
Pages with axe violations
1662 of 1663 CSV
Median Alfa failures / page
86
Pages with Alfa failures
432 of 432 CSV
Unique pages audited
1663
Lighthouse performance (median)
83/100 174 sampled details
Lighthouse SEO (median)
100/100
Lighthouse best practices (median)
96/100
Lighthouse agentic (median)
94/100
Words per page (median)
793 main content, nav excluded
Reading ease (median)
45 748 prose pages details
Reading grade (median)
12
Misspellings
25+ distinct details
Broken links
375 details
Median page weight
5.0 MB -123 KB better
Median requests per page
45
Estimated energy per page (mean)
1.6557 Wh

Note: page counts differ between weeks (3330 → 1858). Prefer the "pages affected" columns over raw instance counts when comparing.

Scan coverage this week (1858 pages · 2423 succeeded of 2664 attempted)
Pages each engine ran on, per the configured weekly sampling rates.
EnginePagesCoverage
axe166390%
resources166390%
standards87647%
plain-language86146%
alfa43223%
sustainability17710%
lighthouse1749%
tech1699%
deprecated-html1659%
security1408%

History & Trends → Severity, Lighthouse and other measures across 17 weeks.

Changes since 2026-W37 23 change(s)

axe-core

  • New: button-name appeared this week.
  • New: aria-dialog-name appeared this week.
  • New: aria-required-children appeared this week.
  • New: tabindex appeared this week.
  • Resolved: table-duplicate-name no longer fails on any scanned page.
  • Resolved: aria-allowed-attr no longer fails on any scanned page.
  • Resolved: document-title no longer fails on any scanned page.
  • landmark-one-main shrank: 743 → 458 pages affected (rate: 25% → 28% of pages scanned).
  • label shrank: 119 → 101 pages affected (rate: 4% → 6% of pages scanned).

Alfa

  • New: sia-r80 appeared this week.
  • New: sia-r84 appeared this week.
  • New: sia-r86 appeared this week.
  • New: sia-r75 appeared this week.
  • Resolved: sia-r17 no longer fails on any scanned page.
  • Resolved: sia-r62 no longer fails on any scanned page.
  • Resolved: sia-r59 no longer fails on any scanned page.
  • Resolved: sia-r85 no longer fails on any scanned page.
  • Resolved: sia-r1 no longer fails on any scanned page.
  • sia-r66 shrank: 624 → 364 pages affected (rate: 87% → 84% of pages scanned).
  • sia-r74 shrank: 252 → 177 pages affected (rate: 35% → 41% of pages scanned).
  • sia-r73 shrank: 210 → 138 pages affected (rate: 29% → 32% of pages scanned).
  • sia-r70 shrank: 152 → 100 pages affected (rate: 21% → 23% of pages scanned).
  • sia-r14 shrank: 82 → 66 pages affected (rate: 11% → 15% of pages scanned).

Embedded & linked resources

Non-HTML resources this site links to or embeds — PDFs, Office documents, iframes, and media. The site owner is responsible for their accessibility too. Full inventory with first-seen dates: CSV.

New this week (1904)

3182 distinct resources, by type.
TypeCount
PDF documents2512
Images310
Spreadsheets93
Embedded media players84
Presentations44
Iframes41
Video files39
Word/text documents28
Archives (zip, etc.)20
Audio files11