vital-scans open quality ledger

www.medicare.gov: week 2026-W39

This is the 2026-W39 ISO-week report (2061 pages fetched, 1996 unique pages audited by axe/Alfa). Generated 2026-09-30. Compared against 2026-W38 (2058 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: 6 required finding type(s) (handling: review). Aspirational queue: 0 finding type(s). Advisory queue: 0 finding type(s). Unmapped review queue: 6 finding type(s).

New this week
1
Fixed this week
0
Regressed this week
2

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 1722 — Wrap all page content in landmarks (header, nav, main, footer) so users can navigate by region. pages (CSV)
Text has minimum contrast ratio of 4.5:1 (WCAG 1.4.8) (rule↗) Moderate 517 — See remediation guidance: https://alfa.siteimprove.com/rules/sia-r73 pages (CSV)
Target size is at least 44×44 CSS pixels (Enhanced) (WCAG 2.5.5) (rule↗) Moderate 517 — See remediation guidance: https://alfa.siteimprove.com/rules/sia-r111 pages (CSV)
aria-hidden element does not contain focusable elements (WCAG 4.1.2) (rule↗) Moderate 446 Without vision, Limited vision See remediation guidance: https://alfa.siteimprove.com/rules/sia-r17 pages (CSV)
Scrolling content can be accessed by keyboard (WCAG criterion undetermined) (rule↗) Moderate 475 — See remediation guidance: https://alfa.siteimprove.com/rules/sia-r57 pages (CSV)
Text has enhanced contrast (WCAG 1.4.6) (rule↗) Moderate 258 — Increase text contrast to meet WCAG AAA (7:1). pages (CSV)
Table header has scope (WCAG criterion undetermined) (rule↗) Moderate 145 — See remediation guidance: https://alfa.siteimprove.com/rules/sia-r78 pages (CSV)
Heading levels should only increase by one (WCAG criterion undetermined) (rule↗) Moderate 43 — Use heading levels in order (h1 → h2 → h3) without skipping; structure, not size. pages (CSV)

Progress

Open findings by severity over 16 weeks (lower is better)
Serious Moderate Minor W24W31W39170

This week at a glance 21 issue type(s)
Median axe violations / page
2
Pages with axe violations
1726 of 1996 CSV
Median Alfa failures / page
53
Pages with Alfa failures
517 of 517 CSV
Unique pages audited
1996
Lighthouse performance (median)
39/100 215 sampled details
Lighthouse SEO (median)
92/100
Lighthouse best practices (median)
54/100
Lighthouse agentic (median)
100/100
Words per page (median)
200 main content, nav excluded
Reading ease (median)
39.5 599 prose pages details
Reading grade (median)
14.1
Misspellings
25+ distinct details
Broken links
51 details
Median page weight
7.2 MB -19 KB better
Median requests per page
114
Estimated energy per page (mean)
2.2744 Wh

Note: page counts differ between weeks (2058 → 2061). Prefer the "pages affected" columns over raw instance counts when comparing.

Scan coverage this week (2061 pages · 2280 succeeded of 2304 attempted)
Pages each engine ran on, per the configured weekly sampling rates.
EnginePagesCoverage
axe199697%
resources199697%
standards103850%
plain-language97247%
alfa51725%
lighthouse21510%
sustainability20810%
deprecated-html20210%
tech19810%
security1919%

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

Changes since 2026-W38 3 change(s)

axe-core

No rule-level changes.

Alfa

  • New: sia-r18 appeared this week.
  • sia-r57 spread: 472 → 475 pages affected (rate: 94% → 92% of pages scanned).
  • sia-r66 shrank: 267 → 258 pages affected (rate: 53% → 50% 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 (218)

1532 distinct resources, by type.
TypeCount
PDF documents1261
Iframes215
Audio files54
Images1
Archives (zip, etc.)1