It’s time to sort out your accessibility

Billie says: “Get your accessibility right for your SEO strategies.”

Why is accessibility so important in 2025?

“In June 2025 the European Accessibility Act is going to become law for all countries within the EU, but also any countries or businesses that trade within the EU.

It’s really important that you focus on your accessibility now so that you are compliant when this law comes into place. It’s one thing to be inaccessible just because you don’t want to do the work but it’s another thing to be opening yourself up to lawsuits, fines, and compliance issues.

It’s time to listen and get that accessibility work going.”

What changes need to be implemented in 2025 because of the European Accessibility Act?

“A lot of the work will be technical-SEO focused, and doing a lot of the basics like making sure your alt text is in place and having a well-structured site.

This is why it comes so easily into SEO because a lot of the things that we’re checking as part of our normal workflow is the same work we should be doing to create an accessible site. You need to make sure that the ways that disabled users would be using your site are accessible.

When you are checking the content structure, don’t just look through it to make sure the heading tags are in place and the links are well-structured. You also want to make sure that the page makes sense if you are using a screen reader, or you’re using the tab key to navigate. Look at things like colour contrast, and use a few additional tools as part of your normal workflow to identify accessibility issues early on.”

Does this require a major project to analyse the structure and usability of the site or is it more of an ongoing part of your weekly tasks?

“I am by no means saying that SEOs should stop what they’re doing and specialise in accessibility. It’s just adding minor things to your to-do list or small steps to the processes you already have in place.

Start checking accessibility issues as part of your normal workflow, rather than leaving them to be ignored or hoping that a developer or designer (or accessibility specialist, if you’re lucky enough to have one) might pick them up. You can help create that accessible space by barely doing anything. It’s very little work to become better advocates for a more accessible internet.”

What are some of the metrics that SEOs can focus on to measure the impact of improving accessibility on a website?

“I’m not going to delve too deeply into the maths of it all because it gets a bit overwhelming. However, in the USA, 27% of Americans live with a disability, 63.8% of the disabled community have frequent access to the internet, and 91% of Americans just have access to the internet at some point.

You can do the maths and come up with some figures about how much of your potential customer base could be living with some form of disability. Using those figures, that’s about 18.9% of the total American internet population that has some form of disability. That’s a large number. Nearly 20% of your potential customer base could have some form of disability, so you could say that nearly 20% of your online revenue comes from disabled users. If your site is not accessible, you are missing out on up to 20% of your potential revenue.

It depresses me that we have to try and assign a monetary value to people in order to do this accessibility work, but it is a large number of any population. In the UK, 15.8% of the internet population has some form of disability, and you can break that down country by country.

The cool thing about data, accessibility, and SEO (and it’s a lovely cross-correlation) is that, when studies crawled and audited the top 1 million pages of the internet, they found that 96% of them are not accessible. That means, knowing that a large amount of the internet population has some form of disability, you can have a competitive edge. It’s very unlikely that your competitors are doing the work to create an accessible site.

The fantastic correlation between it all is that a lot of SEO best practices directly tie into accessibility and vice versa. You can do your basic job, and also do that additional auditing to get the extra compliance done, and you’re not just improving your online rankings – you’re also creating a better user experience for disabled users.

That’s the amazing thing about all this data and the business case for it. If you’ve already built the business case for SEO, just sneak a little bit of accessibility work in there. You won’t have to go far out of your way to do it.”

What makes those 96% of web pages not accessible?

“How long is a piece of string? WebAIM conducted this study where they looked at the homepage of the top 1 million websites, and they used an auditing tool called WAVE to see what issues were popping up and get an understanding of how accessible a website is for disabled users.

They looked at trends over time for this, and it’s really interesting. It’s definitely worth reading the entire study. It’s very lengthy, though, so I’m not going to go into it too much. They looked at quite a lot of different things there, like HTML elements on all pages, how links are built on the page, how they look, and the wording around them. They even looked at the different links to the same domain and how SEO played a part in the accessibility.

It’s a really fascinating study because it’s interesting how many websites have the same problem. You’d think that, in a sample of a million pages, there could be a billion different things that people are getting wrong. It’s fascinating how many businesses and websites are making the same mistakes and have the same problems.”

What are some of the primary accessibility tasks that you would recommend for SEOs to focus on?

“I’m interested in limited mobility, but accessibility is such a diverse piece of work. The thing I immediately look at is, can I navigate a page or an entire website only using the tab key and the enter key? Do I go down the page in a logical order, and can I select the links that I want to select? This gives me an idea of how navigable a page is.

Then, I will do the exact same thing with JavaScript switched off. I like to see how JavaScript actually affects usability. It’s a really common problem where you can’t select a link when JavaScript has been disabled. That is one of the main things I check for.

For a really quick SEO win, is there an HTML sitemap? Does it make sense? Can I navigate that properly? Then, I will also use a screen reader to listen to a page. I want to make sure that the buttons, tables, images, and links are well-described as I go through the page. Do I understand where I’m going if I’m not looking at that page? Do I understand what I should be seeing and where I should be going?

You should also make notes on the user experience. It’s really important that you know what the user experience is, to keep a user on site. The longer they’re on the site, the more likely they’re going to convert. The more pages that they see, the more opportunities you have to take them down the funnel to a sale.

You want to give them a good experience from landing on the page to checking out. Just try out that process in a few different ways. That’s how you will learn the most.”

Can you use AI to improve accessibility?

“Yes and no. There are some tools out there that promise to fix the accessibility of your entire website just by using AI.

AI is fantastic at helping you understand data and summarise your findings. However, accessibility is such a human experience that I wouldn’t use AI to audit a site for accessibility.

Just use it to help you build your business case and summarise data. It’s such a human experience that it needs to be looked at on a human level.”

If an SEO is struggling for time, what should they stop doing right now so they can spend more time doing what you suggest in 2025?

“Stop worrying about all of the updates that are happening as they’re happening. Instead of sitting around and reading every article – with everyone trying to tell you or sell you on how they’re recovering from updates that have just come out – wait until things are properly rolled out and read from the experts.

Use that time to re-audit a website with a focus on accessibility. Do something productive instead of reading doom and gloom.

If you’re worrying about certain tasks, such as Core Web Vitals tasks, etc., I don’t see them as being as high of a priority as they were a couple of years ago. Instead of checking them regularly, move on to accessibility.

It’s all about what your priorities are, how much impact they actually have on a website, and your mental health. Do what fits for you. It’s really easy to find something productive to look at instead.”

Billie Geena Hyde is Founder at RankSuite and an Independent SEO Consultant, and you can find her over at BillieGeena.co.uk.

The WebAIM Million - The 2024 report on the accessibility of the top 1,000,000 home pages: https://webaim.org/projects/million/