If you look up the definition of SEO, you’ll likely find dozens of great articles that provide clear definitions and helpful tips without ever seeing the word “accessibility.” Likewise, it’s possible to have worked in the SEO field for years without ever coming across the concept of accessibility or needing to understand it to do one’s job well.
Yet web accessibility – when web content is designed to be used and understood by all people, including those with disabilities – goes hand-in-hand with SEO, short for search engine optimization – the practice of improving your site to make it more visible on search engines. The reasons are myriad, but here are just a few important connections between web accessibility and SEO:
- Both entail making technical improvements to a site to optimize the user experience
- Both are concerned with increasing the visibility of web content
- Search engines have similar characteristics to the assistive technologies that many people with disabilities use to interact with web content
Because of their overlapping goals and strategies, web accessibility and SEO can support each other when approached in an integrated way. Instead of leaving accessibility to designers and developers and SEO to the marketing specialists, it benefits accessibility experts and SEO experts to break down silos, understand each others’ goals, and integrate their strategies so that highly accessible content can be found in search engines and well-optimized content can actually be used and understood by the people who find it.
Keep reading to learn more about what web accessibility is, why it matters for SEO, and how to start integrating the two to make your web content even more awesome.
What is web accessibility?
The whole concept needs to be broken into different sections.
Understanding accessibility
To understand the concept of web accessibility, it’s important to first understand the concept of accessibility. This term has come to be used socially, politically, and legally to convey the usability of public spaces, goods, and services to those who have disabilities, including visual, auditory, physical, neurological, cognitive, and speech impairments.
Until the 1970s, there were little to no protections on the books in the U.S. for people with disabilities. Children with disabilities could be discriminated against in schools, adults with disabilities could be turned away from jobs, and public accommodations we take for granted today – from wheelchair ramps and lifts on buses to closed captions on films – were either rare or nonexistent. In short, daily life was largely inaccessible for a huge portion of the population, affecting every part of their survival, from education to income to quality of life.
This began to change in the latter half of the 20th century with laws designed to remove barriers to education, jobs, healthcare, public goods and services, and more for people with disabilities. Shortly after the Civil Rights Movement, the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 expanded federal protections of people with disabilities. In 1990, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) extended the rights codified in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to those with disabilities.
By 2000, Americans had made accessibility an ethical and legal priority – but as time passed, technology evolved, and the laws needed to adapt.
Accessibility in the age of the internet
The first federal and civil rights laws pertaining to disability were written well before the internet. When government agencies and businesses started going online to inform the public or sell their products and services, users with disabilities were faced with barriers that hadn’t existed before.
Some sites weren’t compatible with assistive technologies such as screen readers; others were designed with poor color contrast or difficult navigation structures. When such barriers prevented users from accessing goods or services, it wasn’t long before lawsuits were filed. Some of the most prominent cases have included the websites for Domino’s Pizza and even Beyonce’s merchandise and concert ticket sales.
On what grounds have these lawsuits been filed? According to the Department of Justice, the places of public accommodation mentioned in the ADA – which are required to be accessible to all people – include websites. That’s because for businesses like Domino’s and any other business from which users buy a product or service online, the website is considered their place of business. If it’s not accessible to customers with disabilities, it’s not compliant with accessibility laws.
Like the ADA, the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 now also applies to web content. In 1998, Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act was added to require federal agencies to remove barriers from information technology – including websites and web content.
Defining web accessibility
With an understanding of accessibility, it’s easy to see how the principles of nondiscrimination toward users with disabilities would apply to web content, particularly eCommerce websites where business takes place all online.
The World Wide Web Consortium, also called W3C, publishes guidelines for making web content compliant with legal accessibility requirements. Widely considered an authority on web accessibility, W3C says web accessibility is achieved when “websites, tools, and technologies are designed and developed so that people with disabilities can use them.”
Importantly, these disabilities include not just those already listed in this article, but also “situational” disabilities, such as using a computer in bright sunlight, not being able to play sound, or even using a mobile device with a small screen.
In other words, web accessibility means that all people can use, understand, interact with, and contribute to the Web in as many situations and environments as possible.
The business case for web accessibility
Like SEO, there is really no good reason not to make your web content accessible. If you want people to interact with your business and buy your goods and services, you need your site to be usable by as many people in as many situations as possible. Of course, a major difference is you probably won’t get sued for bad SEO practices (though black hat practices certainly cross ethical if not legal lines).
But as a reminder, here’s why your eCommerce site needs to make accessibility just as much of a priority as SEO:
- It’s the right thing to do. Inaccessible web content creates discriminatory barriers to people with permanent and situational disabilities.
- It’s legally required. Not complying with the law puts you at risk of lawsuits that cost money and cause reputational damage.
By not making web content accessible, you’re hurting not just users and potential customers, but also yourself – you risk losing business, getting fined, and paying legal fees.
Accessibility and SEO: How do they fit together?
So, your web content needs to be accessible. But what does that have to do with SEO? Now that we’ve covered the goals of web accessibility, let’s explore how this important concept factors into SEO.
Mutual benefits
As WebAIM points out, accessible content needs good SEO and vice-versa. It doesn’t matter how accessible your content is if no one can find it on search engines, and it doesn’t matter how great your SEO practices are if the people who find your content can’t actually use it or understand it. Good SEO practices and good web accessibility practices support each other.
Machine readability
WebAIM also draws a useful analogy between search engines and users with permanent or situational disabilities: “In many ways, search engines are deaf, blind, use only a keyboard, and have limited technical abilities.”
What’s more, search engines behave similarly to assistive technologies when they “crawl” a web page to determine the nature and quality of its content. So, both SEO practices and accessibility practices are partly concerned with making web content machine-readable.
A search engine needs to be able to “read” various types of data on a website and all its pages, but it doesn’t do so the way humans do. SEO specialists thus have to strategically structure and tag the important elements of each page with the specific “abilities” of a search engine in mind.
Similarly, accessible websites are designed to be “read” and navigated by various types of assistive technology. Some of the most common include:
- Screen readers: Used by people who are blind or have visual impairments to read the text of a page.
- Screen magnification software: Allows users to control the size and visibility of textual and graphical elements of the computer screen.
- Speech input software: Allows users to use speech to input commands, information, and navigate the page instead of physically operating a mouse or keyboard.
- Alternative input devices: Like speech input software, these devices provide alternative ways to control and navigate the page. Examples include head pointers, motion tracking or eye tracking, and single switch entry devices, which are typically used with on-screen keyboards.
Making web content compatible with these types of technologies is not the same as making content readable to search engines. Each may require different, specialized technical skills and knowledge. However, both follow the same principle: making sure that web content plays nice with the technologies that connect it to actual people.
Google and the user experience
From the perspective of Google – effectively the most important search engine in SEO – web accessibility seems like a natural extension of SEO. That’s because Google is committed to centering the user experience.
As a search engine, Google is concerned with providing users with the most accurate, relevant, and highest-quality information in the fastest, easiest way possible. The pages that rank highest on Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs) are those that:
- Best fit the intent of the user’s search query
- Provide information that demonstrates expertise, authority, and trustworthiness (E-A-T)
- Presents information in a user-friendly and highly relevant format
These principles influence everything from which pages rank in which positions to how the SERPs are structured. Google has developed specific types of SERPs for different types of search queries. For example, a query phrased as a question – e.g., “what is web accessibility?” – is likely to result in a SERP with a Quick Answer (also called Featured Snippet) at the top.
The answer to the search query is featured prominently at the top of the page as a “Featured Snippet.” Screenshot retrieved 2/17/22.
On the other hand, a query focused on finding a specific type of product – e.g., “women’s sandals” – will trigger Shopping results. Google understands that the user is probably looking for women’s sandals to buy, so it features products for sale at the top of the page.
When Google determines that the search intent is to purchase a product, the SERPs provide potential products with pricing and star reviews. Screenshot retrieved 2/17/22.
Since Google wants to make sure content featured on SERPs is highly useful and relevant to users, it follows logically that the content should be created with web accessibility in mind. While there is no evidence that web accessibility is an actual ranking factor, many experts surmise that Google favors accessible content in SERPs. Even if this is not provable, it’s just good ethics and smart business to make sure your content isn’t just search-engine-optimized, but also accessible.
Tips for embedding web accessibility into SEO
Like SEO, web accessibility is a dynamic, robust field that tends to evolve quickly as technology grows and changes. Keeping up with best practices and legal requirements can be a challenge, especially when you’re already trying to keep up with the latest SEO trends.
Fortunately, there are resources and steps you can take to start considering web accessibility in your SEO practices. Here are some of the most important:
1. Get educated on web accessibility requirements.
Familiarizing yourself with the ADA, Section 508, and other state and local accessibility laws is a good idea.
From there, the best place to get educated is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, or WCAG, published by the aforementioned W3C. These guidelines contain specific success criteria your website needs to meet legal requirements for web accessibility. While WCAG conformance does not constitute legal compliance, WCAG is considered the global gold standard for web accessibility.
2. Follow SEO best practices.
Again, it doesn’t matter how accessible your content is if it’s not showing up in search results. Following SEO best practices on all your web content ensures that the people who need your content can actually find it.
Plus, many important SEO practices automatically make your content more accessible. Some of the most common examples include:
- Alt text for images: People with visual impairments typically rely on screen readers to describe images that are included in content. Since the screen reader cannot “see” the image, there needs to be a text description of the image. These descriptions are called alt text. For SEOs, they can be a great place to include target keywords, but in the world of accessibility, alt text is a defining factor of whether the user can fully understand the content. In fact, lack of alt text on images that are crucial to the meaning of the content has been grounds for web accessibility lawsuits, including the Beyonce case.
- Structured data: Again, web content needs to be machine readable in order for many assistive technologies to be able to interact with it. Similarly, SEOs structure the data of a page – that is, the stuff that users don’t see but search engines do – in strategic ways in order to make the page “readable” to search engines. Pages that are optimized for machine readability are more accessible than those that aren’t.
- Transcripts for videos and podcasts: Someone who has a hearing impairment or is using their device in an environment where they can’t play sound cannot access video or audio content without a transcript that displays the content in a text format. Thus transcripts, which (like alt text) are great places to include SEO keywords, are also a necessity for web accessibility.
3. Optimize for mobile.
Accessing a website on a mobile phone or tablet is very different from accessing it on a desktop computer, making mobile access a kind of “situational disability.” Screens are smaller, navigation is typically done entirely by touchscreen or voice commands, and pages that may load quickly on a desktop may be slower on a mobile device.
Most SEOs are already well aware of mobile-first indexing, meaning that Google primarily uses the mobile version of a site for indexing and ranking. It makes sense that if more and more people are accessing the Web primarily through mobile devices, Google considers the mobile user experience just as if not more important than the desktop user experience. Thus SEOs can consider mobile optimization not just an SEO issue but an accessibility issue.
Optimizing for accessibility is possible
At the end of the day, SEO and web accessibility have the same goal: get the best information to the right people in the easiest way possible. With a deep understanding of how machines and users interact with their content and a concern for the user experience already central to their work, SEOs are fortunately well positioned to prioritize web accessibility and help make the Web more useful for everyone.
