You’ve probably noticed accessibility coming up more and more in your LinkedIn feed. It may look like a new buzzword, but it has been an important concern for a long time. What’s changed is that more people are paying attention.
In 2025, US federal courts saw a 27% increase in website accessibility lawsuits: plaintiffs filed 3,117 compared to 2,452 in 2024.
In Europe, the European Accessibility Act (EAA) became enforceable in June 2025 and the first cases are now reaching the courts.
On both sides of the Atlantic, the technical benchmark is usually the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). WCAG sets out testable success criteria for making web content usable by people with disabilities, grouped into three conformance levels: A, AA, and AAA. Version 2.2 is the most recent.
Accessibility has now landed on the agendas of marketing and SEO teams. Many of them are asking the same questions: where do we stand today, who should own the work, and how does accessibility relate to our visibility in search engines and AI systems?
Damien Robert has worked in international and enterprise SEO for nearly 20 years and has spent the last six focusing more on web accessibility.
As an Oncrawl client, he also shared his expertise with our product team while we built the Accessibility Lens.
We asked him to answer a few questions about the legal landscape, the limits of automated testing, and why he believes SEO teams should feel accountable for accessibility. He’ll take these ideas even further in his BrightonSEO talk on October 9.
Why accessibility matters for SEO
What’s your background and how did you end up working on both accessibility and SEO?
I’ve worked in SEO for nearly 20 years, mainly international and enterprise SEO. About six years ago, web accessibility became a much bigger part of my work, and the more I learned, the less I could see a clean boundary between the two.
I never stopped being an SEO. I just realised both disciplines are fundamentally about access to information. That is actually the whole topic of my BrightonSEO talk: “Web accessibility is SEO“.
Is accessibility an SEO ranking factor? If not, where does it influence SEO and visibility in AI-generated answers (GEO)?
I wouldn’t sell accessibility as a ranking factor. I think the relationship is even much more interesting than that, and quite non-dual.
SEO, GEO, and accessibility are not identical, but they are not truly separate either. Semantic HTML, headings, descriptive links, transcripts, accessible media, and well-structured content help people navigate information and help search engines and AI systems interpret and retrieve it.
Accessibility does not magically produce rankings or AI citations. It improves many of the same foundations those systems depend on.
Why is accessibility suddenly on marketing and SEO teams’ radar? Beyond the legal pressure, what’s driving it?
Because it has moved from being seen as a specialist compliance issue into customer experience, brand, procurement, and commercial performance. Disabled and neurodivergent people are already in our audiences.
At the same time, search and AI are making structured, understandable, and reusable information more valuable. So accessibility is increasingly becoming part of mainstream digital quality rather than something sitting in a separate accessibility box.
WCAG and the legal landscape
What’s the relationship between accessibility and WCAG 2.2?
Accessibility is the goal. WCAG is the framework that helps us get there. WCAG 2.2 gives us testable success criteria around four very human principles: perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust.
AA is the level most organizations sensibly work toward, but passing WCAG checks should never become more important than whether people can actually use the experience.
What has changed legally since the European Accessibility Act and how do you choose a WCAG target with Legal?
The EAA became applicable on June 28, 2025, to defined products and services, including areas such as e-commerce, banking, and electronic communications, through national legislation. So first, work with Legal to establish exactly which services and markets are in scope. Then agree on the technical target.
I personally favor WCAG 2.2 AA for a modern program, while Legal maps that against the actual local requirement, which may reference the European standard EN 301 549, WCAG 2.1, or something like France’s General Accessibility Improvement Framework (RGAA).
The Carrefour case is a good warning: in June 2026, the Caen court ordered Carrefour to remediate its e-commerce service within six months, with a €500-per-day penalty thereafter, and Carrefour’s own declaration showed 71.21% RGAA conformity. “Mostly accessible” was not enough. A service that is 71% accessible can still stop a customer from completing a very simple goal, like doing their shopping.
WCAG 2.2 lists sufficient techniques for each success criterion. Why doesn’t applying them automatically mean the criterion is met?
One thing I really like about WCAG is that the success criteria are intentionally technology-agnostic. They describe the accessibility outcome, not the exact piece of HTML you must write.
The techniques are examples of ways to get there, and some are technology-specific. So I wouldn’t turn WCAG into a checklist of approved implementations.
If a sufficient technique is implemented correctly and is accessibility-supported, it can demonstrate that criterion, but there may be other perfectly valid ways of achieving the same accessible outcome. The requirement is the success criterion and a successful customer journey, not the technique.
There’s no official WCAG certification, so what proves compliance? How long does it take a mid-sized site to reach a defensible level?
There is no magic accessibility compliance certificate. What gives you a defensible position is evidence: a proper audit, representative sampling, documented real testing with people with disabilities, remediation, and ongoing monitoring.
France is actually quite useful here, because the RGAA gives a very explicit audit methodology and requires an accessibility statement showing whether a service is fully, partially, or non-compliant and, crucially, what is still inaccessible.
I really like that principle. Be brutally honest in your accessibility statement. It should help users understand what works, what does not, and what alternatives exist. It should not act as a marketing badge.
As for timing, think weeks for a good baseline and potentially months for remediation on a complex mid-sized site, not “we ran a crawler on Friday and became compliant on Monday.”
Putting accessibility into practice
What share of accessibility problems can an automated crawl find and what will you still miss without manual or screen reader testing?
I personally use 60% as a rough working figure for automated crawling, then roughly 20% for media asset checks (captions for videos, text alternatives for infographics etc.) and another 20% for customer journey, keyboard, and screen reader testing. But please take those percentages with a large pinch of salt.
They are my own practical rule of thumb from different audits and experiences, not an official industry formula.
The principle matters more than the math: automation gives you scale, media review catches another layer, and human testing tells you whether the experience actually works.
Who should own web accessibility in a company: Legal, the dev team, or SEO?
Shared ownership. Legal understands the exposure. Developers, UX, designers, content teams, and SEO all remove different types of barriers. I still think that one “digital access” person should be accountable overall, but the work itself is multidisciplinary.
And personally, I would go one step further for SEO teams. Even when we do not own accessibility, I think we should feel accountable for it. SEO, GEO, AEO, and accessibility are not identical disciplines, but they are increasingly inseparable around one fundamental question: can people and machines access, understand, and use the information?
That is my point of view, not an industry rule. But if we are already prepared to fight for access for Googlebot, crawlers, and AI agents, I find it increasingly difficult to argue that access for people is somebody else’s problem.
As an executive sponsor, where should you invest first: people, training, audits, or tooling?
People and ownership first. Establish a baseline audit, train the teams creating the website, then use tooling to monitor it continuously.
Buying a dashboard before creating ownership can simply give you those thousands of accessibility errors nobody knows what to do with. Tooling becomes incredibly powerful once someone is responsible for turning the data into change.
What should teams do next?
Start with the website you already have. Listen to it with a screen reader. Use the built-in screen reader on your desktop or mobile today. Create empathy with screen reader everyday users such as blind people.
On Windows, for example, Narrator can be activated with Ctrl + Win + Enter. Try it now, close your eyes, and listen to your own website. Enjoy the experience, or perhaps don’t!
Put accessibility checks into your existing crawl. Fix patterns and templates before individual URLs. Transcribe important media, turn valuable PDF-only information into HTML, and replace vague links with descriptive ones.
Start with the crawl you already run
Damien’s advice to add accessibility checks to your existing crawl is exactly what the Accessibility Lens was built for. It runs automated Lighthouse accessibility audits on your crawled pages, maps each check to the four WCAG 2.2 principles, and shows which page groups and templates to fix first. You can then track your progress from one crawl to the next.
As Damien points out, automation only covers part of the picture. The Accessibility Lens gives you a measurable baseline for your entire site, but a dedicated accessibility assessment is still required to establish WCAG conformance.
Key takeaways
- Accessibility isn’t a ranking factor, but it strengthens the same foundations that search engines and AI systems rely on to interpret and retrieve content.
- Since the EAA, “mostly accessible” is a legal risk. Work with Legal to confirm what’s in scope and which standard applies in each market.
- There’s no official certificate. A defensible position comes from audits, real user testing, honest accessibility statements, and ongoing monitoring.
- Automated crawling finds a large share of issues at scale, and media review and human testing cover what it can’t.
- Accessibility works best with one accountable owner and many contributing teams, including SEO.
See Damien at BrightonSEO
Damien will present “Web accessibility is SEO: If people can’t use it, search won’t trust it” on Friday, October 9, 2026, at 9:30 AM in Auditorium 1.
In his talk, he’ll argue that accessibility, SEO, GEO, and AEO are becoming non-dual practices built around access to organized information.
He’ll also show how inclusive design and machine readability connect through clear site structures, meaningful content, accessible media, and robust metadata, and how product information management (PIM) and digital asset management (DAM) systems fit in. Check out the BrightonSEO website for more details.
For more, sign up for Damien’s 21 Days to #ChangeAbleistHabits: a free 21-day series with one short, actionable accessibility tip in your inbox each day.
