For many years, web accessibility and search engine optimisation (SEO) were treated as completely separate priorities.
Accessibility focused on ensuring people with disabilities could access digital content, while SEO focused on helping websites rank higher in search results.
Today, those two worlds overlap more than ever.
Modern search engines increasingly prioritise user experience and accessible design is one of the strongest ways to improve usability for everyone. When your content is structured clearly and easy to navigate, it benefits both people using assistive technologies and search engines trying to understand your content.
In other words, when your website becomes more accessible, it often becomes easier to discover online as well.
Here are five ways accessibility improvements can strengthen your SEO performance.
Alternative text (alt text) describes images for people who use screen readers, including users who are blind or have low vision.
Alt text is required under WCAG 2.2 AA Success Criterion 1.1.1: Non-text Content, which ensures that visual information is available in a text format.
But alt text also helps search engines understand what an image contains.
Because search engines cannot “see” images, they rely on alt text to interpret the content and context of a visual.
For example:
Instead of writing:
alt="image"
A better description might be:
alt="Teacher demonstrating a science experiment to a classroom of students."
This helps screen reader users understand the image while also giving search engines meaningful information to index.
Accessible websites use semantic HTML and logical heading structures (H1, H2, H3) to organise content.
This allows screen reader users to navigate a page quickly by jumping between headings.
Search engines use these same structural cues to understand the hierarchy of your content.
A well-structured page helps search engines determine:
This makes your content easier to crawl, interpret and index accurately.
Videos and audio content can present accessibility barriers for people who are deaf or hard of hearing.
Providing captions and transcripts ensures that everyone can access the information in multimedia content.
Captions provide synchronised text for spoken dialogue and key sounds, while transcripts provide a complete text version of the content.
For search engines, this text also makes multimedia content fully readable and indexable.
Instead of seeing a video as a black box, search engines can analyse the transcript to understand the topics being discussed. This can help your video content appear in both video results and traditional search results.
Accessible websites tend to share several usability features, including:
These improvements make websites easier for everyone to use, not just people with disabilities.
When visitors can quickly understand your content and move through your site easily, they are more likely to stay longer and explore additional pages.
Search engines interpret these behaviours as indicators of a positive user experience, which can support overall search performance over time.
Many accessibility practices align closely with modern mobile-first design principles.
For example:
These same improvements can positively influence Core Web Vitals, Google's metrics for measuring page speed, responsiveness and visual stability.
The result is a website that performs better on mobile devices while remaining accessible to a wider audience.
Accessibility Improves the Web for Everyone
Accessibility is often seen as a compliance requirement. But in reality, it is simply good digital design.
When websites include meaningful alt text, clear headings, transcripts, captions and readable visual design, they become easier for people to navigate and understand.
Best of all when content is easier for people to use, it is often easier for search engines to interpret as well.
This is why accessibility improvements frequently support SEO performance, not because they are designed for algorithms, but because they prioritise human experience.
When we design for people with disabilities, we make digital content better for everyone.
Need Help Making Your Content Accessible?
Improving accessibility doesn’t just benefit users, it strengthens the clarity and structure of your digital content.
At Meet Aandi, we help organisations audit and remediate websites, documents, and videos so they meet WCAG 2.2 AA accessibility standards.
Whether you need help reviewing your website, improving your content structure, or making multimedia accessible, our team can guide you through the process.
Because accessibility isn’t just about compliance, it’s about ensuring everyone can access your information.