Accessibility work usually gets framed as a compliance obligation, which is why it tends to sit at the bottom of the list until something forces it up. That framing undersells it. A large share of accessibility work makes a site more legible to search engines and AI systems for exactly the same reason it makes it more usable for people: both depend on content having a clear, machine-readable structure.
This is not a claim that accessibility is an SEO tactic. It is an observation that the two overlap more than most site owners realize, and the overlap is where the cheapest wins are.
Screen readers and search crawlers consume your page the same way: as structure and text, without the visual layout that makes it make sense to everyone else.
Primo Collab
Why the overlap exists
Sighted visitors understand a page through visual hierarchy. Larger text reads as a heading. Something in a box reads as related. A blue underlined word reads as a link.
Screen readers get none of that. Neither do search crawlers or AI retrieval systems. All three rely on the underlying markup to tell them what a thing is. When your markup says what your design implies, everything that reads your page non-visually works better at once.
The changes that help both
Real heading structure
Headings should describe the document outline, not the font size. One H1 that states what the page is about, H2s for main sections, H3s for subsections, in order and without skipping levels.
For accessibility, this is how screen reader users navigate a page. For search, it is how crawlers understand what the page covers and which passages answer which question. Bold text styled to look like a heading serves neither.
Descriptive link text
“Click here” and “read more” tell a screen reader user nothing when links are listed out of context, and they tell a crawler nothing about the destination. “See our maintenance plans” does both jobs.
Alt text that describes the image
For accessibility, alt text is how a non-sighted user knows what the image conveys. For search, it is the only description of image content available, and it contributes to how the page is understood.
The rule for both is the same: describe what the image shows and why it is there. Decorative images that add nothing should have empty alt attributes so screen readers skip them rather than announcing a filename.
Proper form labels
Every input needs a real label element associated with it. Placeholder text is not a label: it disappears when typing starts, which is an accessibility failure and a usability failure that costs completions.
This one shows up directly in conversion data, not just in audits.
Sufficient colour contrast
Text needs enough contrast against its background to be readable. This does not affect crawlers, but it affects a meaningful share of your actual visitors, including everyone reading on a phone in sunlight, which is most people some of the time.
Keyboard navigation
Everything clickable should be reachable and operable with a keyboard alone. This catches a broad class of implementation problems, and custom-built menus, sliders, and modals fail it constantly.
Semantic HTML for page regions
Using nav, main, header, footer, and article elements rather than a page built entirely from generic divs gives both screen readers and crawlers a map of what each region is.
The parts that are accessibility only
For clarity, some things genuinely are about access rather than search, and are worth doing regardless:
- Captions and transcripts for video and audio
- Visible focus indicators so keyboard users can see where they are
- Not conveying information by colour alone
- Avoiding auto-playing media and content that moves without a way to stop it
Where to start
If you are doing this on a limited budget, this order gets the most value:
- Fix heading structure on your top pages. Cheapest, helps everything.
- Add real alt text to images that carry meaning.
- Fix form labels. Directly affects conversions.
- Check colour contrast on body text and buttons.
- Test your main conversion path with a keyboard only.
An automated accessibility checker will catch perhaps a third of real issues. It is a reasonable starting point, but the keyboard test in step five finds problems no scanner reports.
The mistake to avoid
Installing an accessibility overlay widget and considering it handled. These tools have been widely criticized by actual screen reader users, they do not fix the underlying markup, and because the markup is what search engines read, they deliver none of the search benefit either. The fixes above are mostly small, permanent changes to your templates. An overlay is a script that sits on top of the problem.