Why Accessibility Has Never Been More Profitable

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We keep talking about digital accessibility as an optional nice-to-have that gets tacked on at the end of a project if there is budget left, if the client insists, or if an audit happens to land badly. Meanwhile, SEO has been benefiting from it for fifteen years, user experience has always depended on it, the law now imposes it on private companies as well as the public sector, and agentic AI systems just discovered what screen reader users already knew. Strange.

Over my 18 years of experience in this field, I have observed one constant: HTML semantics, the thing I was taught as an obvious given and have been repeating ever since, is the only skill that benefits everyone at the same time. Everyday people. People with disabilities, who need a genuinely accessible web. And now machines, Google yesterday, AI agents today.

The way I approach this topic will inevitably be through my own lens: that of a front-end developer turned UX designer, then accessibility auditor, who ended up writing two books on the subject. (more on that later)

Let’s walk through, or walk through again, four areas where accessibility has already proven its worth: SEO, user experience, GEO and the agentic experience, and finally the legal and professional landscape, which just shifted under our feet.

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My passion for semantics (HTML)

How do you define HTML semantics without turning it into an entire course? One image is enough. Picture a warehouse where every box carries a precise label: “fragile,” “stackable,” “open first,” rather than just another anonymous box among many.

Semantic HTML is exactly that. A <button> says “I am actionable.” A <nav> says “I am a path to somewhere else.” An <h2> says “I structure the content, I am not just bigger than the text around me.” A <div> on its own says nothing. It waits for meaning to be given to it, or it just serves as a decorative element.

Over my years of experience in this field, I have observed one constant: that label, once applied correctly, benefits three audiences that have long been treated separately. Search engines, which have always read it to index your pages. People who navigate differently, by keyboard, by screen reader, or simply with different display needs. And, more recently, AI agents, which have to decide where to click on your behalf without ever seeing your interface. These are the three areas we will walk through now, in that order.

SEO: semantics has been paying off for a long time

So what really connects accessibility and search engine optimization? The same skeleton of tags.

I have been interested in code quality as a source of SEO data for a long time. As early as 2015, I was already documenting the value of schema.org microdata, a vocabulary distinct from accessibility but built on the same idea: giving your markup structured meaning rather than leaving it flat, to help search engines understand what they are reading. Accessibility and HTML semantics follow a similar logic, with a different starting goal, usability by humans and assistive technologies, but with an identical side effect: the reference documentation on web accessibility confirms it, search engines “give more weight to keywords contained in titles, links, etc., than to keywords contained in non-semantic <div>s.”

A clean heading hierarchy, an alt attribute that actually describes the image, a link label that says where it leads rather than a vague “learn more,” these are exactly the same elements a screen reader and an indexing bot will look for to understand your page. This is not a happy coincidence. It is the same information, structured once, consumed twice.

Tip: next time someone sells you accessibility and SEO as two separate projects with two separate budgets, ask about the alt text, the single <h1>, the explicit link text. You will get the same answer on both sides.

User experience: accessible means usable, for everyone

Let’s move to another often-overlooked aspect. I am sometimes asked to choose between a beautiful form and an accessible form. The question itself is the problem.

My audit of ten WordPress form plugins shows this plainly: I advised plugin developers to “get into accessibility and get trained, because it is going to become a selection criterion,” and the finding, plugin after plugin, was the same. Labels not linked to their fields. Error messages poorly announced, or not announced at all, to screen readers and other assistive technologies, yet perfectly visible to an everyday visitor (if there happens to be one at that exact moment 😃). Border contrasts at 1.74:1 when the recommendation is 3:1. These are not isolated accessibility flaws. They are usability flaws, plain and simple, that penalize a visually impaired person just as much as someone in a hurry on mobile in bright sunlight.

That is the whole point of a genuine accessibility audit: it does not just tick WCAG boxes, it reveals usability problems that affect everyone. A form that cannot be navigated by keyboard is a form that will block disabled users just as much as power users who rely on the keyboard out of habit. Since when do we want frustrating experiences for our users?

Navigation that is inconsistent for a screen reader is often just as inconsistent for a sighted eye, which simply compensates with more visual cues. Want to start auditing your own forms right now? Check your labels, your contrasts, your error handling, your keyboard navigation. These are the same four points that come up, again and again, in my analyses.

A form is the beginning of a conversation. Not a data collection exercise where all the effort falls on the person answering. And a failed conversation, in writing, cannot be fixed on the fly.

GEO and the agentic experience: the same semantics, for new readers

And here comes a new chapter. Over the past few months, everyone has been discovering GEO, Generative Engine Optimization (optimizing to be cited by generative AI rather than ranked in a list of blue links). And guess what shows up there, once again.

A recent GEO guide puts it plainly: “if it is hard for AI engines to access (slow loading times, poor HTML structure, lack of markup), it risks going unnoticed.” And further down, in the same list of technical factors: “compliance with accessibility standards (contrast, keyboard navigation, alt text) opens your site to all audiences and strengthens its machine readability.”

To understand why, picture this. Imagine every web page has an invisible twin, an accessibility tree, the structure browsers build behind the scenes to give every element a role, a name, and a state. Screen readers have always used it to navigate without ever seeing the page. AI agents, those new tools that crawl the web, fill out forms, and click on your behalf, just discovered they can use it in exactly the same way. They do not see your beautiful design. They read the structure.

The CEO of Deque Systems, an accessibility tools vendor since 1999, sums up the shift underway: agentic AI bots now account for more web requests worldwide than humans themselves. And meanwhile, according to the WebAIM Million 2026 report cited there, 95.9% of home pages still contain detectable accessibility failures. See the problem. We are building a web increasingly read by machines that need structure, on foundations that still do not have any.

“Accessible for humans becomes visible for AI,” as one marketer quoted by Deque put it. A maxim that has the merit of being true, and one that should be enough to convince those for whom the ethical argument alone was never enough to move the needle.

(I am not saying ethics should need a business argument to matter, but if one is needed, here is a remarkably effective one 🙂)

What the EAA officially changed, since June 2025

Between us, it is not as if accessibility professionals had not been shouting for decades that this would need to happen eventually. Back in 2022, while testing WordPress form plugins, I was already writing to the teams building them that a “European Directive with the pleasant name European Accessibility Act is going to take effect sometime in 2025.” In 2024, in an article on inclusion, I noted that the EAA “requires its member states to adopt an accessible design approach by 2025.”

Also in 2022, I was warning on LinkedIn that designers and developers needed to train up for their own employability, and I even wrote a series of books about it. I was also warning about the dream sellers and hot air merchants who were about to flood the market: accessibility overlays, weekend auditors, and consulting firms “specialized in accessibility since 2025” 🫣

What concretely changes for the private sector: consumer computers and smartphones, ATMs and payment terminals, telephony services, banking services, transport, e-commerce, e-books. This is no longer the narrow scope of the public sector we had gotten used to. It is the private sector, broadly, now falling within the scope of a legal obligation, with designated enforcement authorities in every member state to make sure it is respected.

And just as I predicted, the dream sellers and hot air merchants have indeed flooded the market.

In short, if your profile as a designer or developer does not include accessibility skills, it will not just be less good. It will be out of compliance, and maybe even out of the market.

What it earns you, very concretely

Ready to step outside your professional comfort zone? Because there is an angle we still do not talk about enough: accessibility as a hiring argument.

The most recent studies from France Travail (the 2026 BMO survey) put the recruitment difficulty rate in digital roles at around 49.5%, compared to 43.8% across all sectors combined.

The main reason? Difficulty finding qualified profiles.

I will let you calculate what that means at the scale of every large company that will have to comply with the EAA now and over the coming years, on products already on the market that benefit from a transition period until 2030. One more string to your bow, let’s say.

What if we had to conclude?

Let’s recap. SEO has benefited from semantics since Google has existed. User experience has always depended on it, accessibility or not. GEO and AI agents just discovered an accessibility tree that screen readers have been walking through for, what, 20 years?

The law, meanwhile, has stopped asking for your opinion since June 28, 2025. And the job market is slowly starting to fall in line behind all of this.

I am deliberately laying it on thick in this article, but the reality has been there for a long time: most of the time, we do nothing but relegate accessibility to the rank of nice-to-have, when it is the only cross-cutting skill that serves everyday people, disabled people, and now the machines reading the web on your behalf, all at once.

You might tell me the topic is too vast, that it would take months to cover it properly. And you would be right. But at the same time, that only reinforces my point: this is not a project to keep postponing.

So, as a designer or developer, what is the most recent skill you have picked up in your field? And more importantly: does building up your skills in digital accessibility not sound like a good plan for what comes next?

Sources & Resources

• French article: Remettre l’humain au centre des usages
• Claude Design, breaking the model’s biases to include accessibility from the start
• 2026 BMO Survey
• Information on accessibility overlays