W3C recognized on the 2026 Forbes Accessibility 200 list

Notes

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is honored to be included in the Forbes Accessibility 200 list for 2026 in recognition of the impact that our Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) has had on the world. This award is  especially meaningful today as we celebrate the 15th Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD)

The Web is fundamentally designed to work for all people, whatever their hardware, software, language, location, or ability. Since it first formed in 1997, the WAI community has been at the heart of defining what it even means to be accessible on the Web through our Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), WAI develops standards like WCAG to help make the web accessible to people with disabilities, thus helping us realize our vision of a web that works, for everyone.

“An accessible web is a powerful enabler for people with disabilities. It increases agency, that is, giving us more control over our lives. Many things that are difficult or impossible in the physical world can be done easily on the web - when it is accessible.” Shawn Henry, Director, Web Accessibility Initiative.

While standards are the core of our work, we provide much more than that in service of web accessibility, including resources for training, planning accessibility efforts, policy, design and development, and for testing and evaluating. This enables our community to have a broad, global impact and we’re proud to be a part of the Forbes Accessibility 200 list.

The list itself was compiled on the basis of more than 700 interviews and conversations with industry experts. The Forbes Accessibility 200 project was shaped by an advisory panel of 12 global experts who also provided input on candidate organizations. The list places emphasis on the size of impact over the widest breadth of people.

With over almost 75% of the world’s population using the web, our work touches a very large amount of people. And our work isn’t done. We are developing WCAG 3 to include considerations around web content, apps, tools, publishing, and emerging technologies on the web as well as additional information about the ways web technologies need to work with authoring tools, user agents, and assistive technologies.

Our thanks again to Forbes and the experts on the Forbes advisory panel for recognizing the importance and impact of our work, and congratulations to the 199 other companies and nonprofits based in 24 countries across six continents on the list!