Accessibility for all users, even search engines

Accessibility for all users, even search engines

On further reflection, this overlap makes sense. The goal of accessibility is to make web content accessible to as many people as possible, including those who experience that content under technical, physical, or other constraints. It may be useful to think of search engines as users with substantial constraints: they can’t read text in images, can’t interpret JavaScript or applets, and can’t “view” many other kinds of multimedia content. These are the types of problems that accessibility is supposed to solve in the first place.

Walking through a few checkpoints

Now that I’ve discussed the theory of why high accessibility overlaps with effective SEO, I will show how it does so. To do this, I am going to touch upon each Priority 1 checkpoint in the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, which affects search-engine optimization.