Website accessibility generally refers to making the website available to everyone, regardless of ability, education, or technology. There are 14.1 million disabled people in the UK alone. If your website is inaccessible, you could potentially lose millions of visits, sales, and leads a month.

But choosing to make your website more accessible isn’t just a way to serve a larger customer base; If implemented properly, web accessibility can also increase your SEO efforts and increase your website’s organic search rankings. 

Google is a strong advocate for accessibility and believes that any website or application should be easily used by anyone. 

“When we say we want to build for everyone – we mean it. Accessibility is written into our mission statement and core to our values as a company. We don’t think a problem is solved until we’ve solved it for everyone. Technology’s great promise is to give everyone the same power to achieve their goals. As long as there are barriers for some, there’s still work to be done.”

— Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google

How does Google promote greater accessibility? 

For many years, Google has encouraged developers and site owners to take steps to achieve accessibility. In fact, today, it is the core of all their products. Google Docs now have a dictation option and they have published templates so everyone can access any document you create. 

Accessibility needs to be at the heart of every SEO strategy. 

Google Lighthouse is one of the most well-known SEO tools, and accessibility is right at the heart of it. By running the main audit, you will get scores on performance, best practices, accessibility, and SEO. 

For developers, they have created tools to test the usability of your Android applications. 

For digital marketers and video creators, they have created better subtitle options on YouTube. 

This is helpful for us as an SEO because we can quickly organize our transcripts. 

Common accessibility issues 

There are countless disabilities out there and it is important to create a site that is accessible to as many people as possible. 

The most common accessibility issues I have encountered are: 

Users who need screen readers

There are millions of people in the world with visual impairments, but this does not prevent them from browsing the web. Users all over the world use screen readers to use social media and your websites. 

It’s important to make sure that all your websites have clear titles and are usable by screen readers. I often use this plugin to check the performance of my client’s website in a screen reader.

For users with limited mobility 

Many users have limited mobility, which means they may not be able to use a mouse or keyboard. They can use sticky keys to better navigate their computer, or they may avoid the computer altogether and use a tablet. 

Some quick wins you can do are to ensure that there is no cumulative layout shift so that your page does not move when it loads. Also, make sure that all the buttons on the menu are not too close so that they can easily click the correct option. 

For users with ADHD 

I find that many websites with interstitial ads can be distracting. I know that many people with ADHD struggle with a lot of interstitial popping up on a site, and I think this will make the site unusable for anyone. 

A good example of annoying interstitials is literally any British news website other than the BBC because they do not offer advertisements. 

It will be much easier for any user if they try to have a clean and simple site with a clear navigation system. 

What to consider for SEO and accessibility

Site Structure 

The foundation of online accessibility is very similar to the core of any SEO strategy: you need a clear and logical site and page structure. You need to consider: 

• Clear navigation 
• Sitemap 
• Breadcrumbs 

All these elements are also essential for SEO, they provide a simple way for Google to crawl and understand the structure of the site. 

Navigation 

Site navigation is very important to help visitors quickly find the content they are looking for. It can also help search engines understand how your website helps it’s users.

Although Google search results are provided at the page level, Google also likes to understand the role that your pages play. They like to understand your site hierarchy. 

Having clean navigation can help users with limited mobility and/or users who need a screen reader to find and select the content that is relevant to them. 

Sitemaps 

Sitemaps can not only help visually impaired users navigate the website smoothly by providing an overview of all content, they also help search engines find and index all your pages. 

Sitemaps are especially useful for designing complex websites, because in this case, search engines may miss or ignore certain pages. Also, navigating complex websites without a sitemap will be a nightmare for visually impaired users. 

Breadcrumbs 

When on a page, the website’s breadcrumbs will show a user the path they have taken and lead them back to the home page.

You often see breadcrumb navigation on eCommerce sites, because they can have hundreds of products. Using breadcrumbs can help users explore the site further to discover new product lines or help users return to the previous page or home page. 

Search engines like breadcrumbs because it helps them understand how the website is organized. 

Page Structure 

Heading tags define the hierarchical structure of website pages in the same way we learned to outline our articles in high school. From H1 to H6, there are six levels of heading tags. 

A good title structure has the following points: 

• Follow a logical sequence 
• Do not skip parts (for example, “H3 does not directly follow H1”)
• Describe the content below with precision 

You can use clear headings to decide which parts are worth reading and which parts are worth skipping.

Additionally, users who rely on screen readers need a well-thought-out title structure to get a good website experience. This is because their screen readers allow them to skip titles until they find the part they want to read.

We know that creating content that meets user intent is essential for SEO, and using titles correctly can make your content easier to understand. Google bluntly said, “It is always beneficial to divide your content into logical parts.” Source: Google 

In addition, a good headline structure can help you get featured snippets, and people also ask for boxes. 

Alt Text 

Alt text is used to provide text replacement for all visual elements on the page. This usually applies to standard images on the page, and the file type is .jpg, .png, or .gif. 

Alt text is different from the title. Subtitles can be seen by all sighted viewers of the web page and placed under the image (obviously, screen readers can also access them). Alt text describes the image on the backend and is not visible to viewers visible on your website. 

This rule also applies to network accessibility. The only difference is that when it comes to web accessibility, alt text should make sense. Imagine that when you browse your page, you don’t actually see any images, but instead read the alt text. Can you understand the full context? 

Visually impaired people use assistive technology to describe the content of the image to the user by relying on alternative text in the image. This makes alt text very important for usability.

It also provides search engines with more information about the content of your website. It can also help you sort by images! 

Video Transcripts 

If you want to share a video on your site, it is recommended that you include a link or drop-down menu for the script. This means that your content is still accessible and provides you with additional ranking opportunities. 

As we said before, Youtube now has tools for creating subtitles, which can be easily transferred to transcripts. 

Readability 

Another accessibility principle can also improve your search engine optimization, making your copy readable means using simple words to write clearly. Basically, this includes: 

• Writing in short sentences and paragraphs 
• Providing definitions of terms and jargon

As SEO’s we don’t fully know how Google uses readability level analysis in its algorithms, but what we are sure is that it like easy to read content. Keeping it simple will help you:

• Get more features:
  Google prefers concise and easy to understand answers for SERP features
• Voice search
  Voice search devices are in essence a screen reader. They need simple wording and structure to convey complete information to humans. Google knows this, so it provides simpler answers, so they are read in response to voice queries. 

Links 

Like alt text, the purpose of optimizing anchor text is to ensure that links are presented to users with relevance and accuracy. High-quality link anchor text can enable users to accurately anticipate the content of the page to be linked to. Users must be able to visually distinguish the link from the surrounding link text. 

Avoid using words like click here. The link text should define the purpose of the link. 

You must provide a skip link to keyboard users so that they can navigate directly to the main content. 

Users who use keyboard navigation or screen reading technology often choose to navigate the site by jumping from one link to another. Since these users usually don’t read the sentences before and after the link, having high-quality link anchor text ensures that these users know where each link points. 

Google believes that the anchor text of a link to a page (in the website and on an external website) is a way to understand the content of the website. 

Schema Markup 

Schema.org is a programming vocabulary that helps to better define the elements and content of web pages. The framework was developed by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Yandex, and is an almost universally accepted way to help search engines understand the content on your website, so that your website and content become better. 

The screen reader is based on code that accurately describes what is displayed on the website. For standard website content, typical semantic HTML tags (such as h1 and title) are usually sufficient. But websites with more advanced content and features require additional markup. 

Many leading SEO experts believe that Schema markup is “one of the most powerful but least used forms of SEO available today.” 

Although there is no evidence that pattern tags have a direct impact on website rankings, there is much evidence that schema tags can increase click-through rates. This is mainly because structured data markup can add rich snippets to your page results in search engines. 

You can find a complete list of structured data types over on the Schema.org site, which will be updated periodically as new labels are released. 

Conclusion 

Despite its growing importance, many marketers view web accessibility as an afterthought. 

The time has come for us to change our minds and give network accessibility the attention it deserves. Not only does it enable a smooth web browsing experience for all users, but it also improves the SEO of your website.

If you’ve found this blog post helpful, you should check my extensive guide on Core Web Vitals