How accessibility overlaps with good content

Writing for inclusion makes your content stronger, clearer, and more effective for everyone.

Accessibility isn't an edge case

When people hear "accessibility," they often imagine niche scenarios: screen readers, braille displays, or complex legal guidelines. And while those things matter, they can obscure a far simpler truth:

Accessibility affects far more people than you might think.

Based on the most recent Australian Bureau of Statistics figures, approximately 5.5 million Australians live with a disability - about 21.4% of the total population. "Disability" here means any long-term condition (lasting six months or more) that restricts everyday activities.

While not every disability directly affects web use, a substantial proportion do - particularly those involving vision, hearing, cognitive, or dexterity limitations:

Vision impairments: Over 13 million Australians have at least one chronic eye condition (hyperopia, myopia, cataracts, colour blindness, macular degeneration), with around 411,000 reporting partial or complete blindness. Even mild vision issues often require screen magnification, high-contrast modes, or screen readers.
Hearing impairments: Disabling hearing loss affects roughly 3-4% of the population, rising to around 50% of Australians aged 65-70. While hearing impairments may not prevent reading onscreen content, they significantly impact engagement with videos and audio unless captions or transcripts are provided.
Cognitive and neurological disabilities: About 7.9% of Australians have profound or severe limitations with communication, mobility, or self-care, many involving cognitive or psychosocial conditions. Even mild cognitive impairments mean users need very clear content with straightforward navigation and simplified language.
Motor and dexterity limitations: Physical conditions account for over 75% of all primary disabilities and often hinder the fine-motor control required for precise mouse movements or touchscreen taps. These users typically rely on keyboard navigation, speech input, or alternative pointing devices.

The reality is that around one in five Australians have a disability that impairs their ability to engage with websites in a "normal" way without assistive support.

But accessibility goes beyond permanent disabilities. It also accounts for:

People recovering from injury and navigating with one hand
Temporary impairments like a broken wrist or eye strain
People using phones in bright sunlight or on shaky trains
People reading in a second language
People who are tired, distracted, or overwhelmed

Accessibility doesn't single people out. It accounts for the full, messy spectrum of how humans actually interact with the web.

Content is at the heart of accessibility

When we talk about accessibility, design and code often get the spotlight. But content decisions - which headings you use, how you describe images, what text you put on a link - are just as important.

A visually perfect site can still be inaccessible if its content is poorly structured or missing key context. And a modest-looking site can be surprisingly usable if its content is written and organised with care.

Accessible content isn't about "dumbing it down." It's about clarifying your intent. That clarity benefits everyone - including users in a hurry, users on mobile, users with cognitive processing differences, and search engines trying to index your site.

When you use clear headings, structured lists, well-labeled buttons, and links that explain where they go, you're not just checking an accessibility box. You're building a page that's easier for everyone to navigate and trust.

You don't need to know ARIA roles or screen reader quirks to contribute to accessibility. You just need to understand the ripple effects of the choices you already make in the CMS.

Accessibility supports SEO (and vice versa)

You might have already noticed something: the same structural choices that help with accessibility - clear headings, descriptive link text, image alt text - are also key to good SEO.

That's because both accessibility tools and search engines rely on the underlying meaning of your content. They can't rely on how something looks. They need the content to explain itself.

So when you improve accessibility, you're often improving SEO at the same time. You're creating content that is clearer to machines and more usable by humans - whether they're searching with a keyword or navigating with assistive technology.

This overlap means that accessibility improvements rarely require additional work - they're often the same improvements that benefit all users and search performance.

Case study: a PDF that nobody can use

Imagine uploading an expression of interest flyer as a PDF. It looks great visually and includes everything a participant might need to fill out. But the text inside is actually an image - there's no selectable text. The form isn't labeled, and screen readers can't read it.

Now imagine you're a user who is blind, trying to fill it in. You can't. The file might as well be blank.

Now imagine you're a user on mobile, with a slow connection. The PDF takes forever to load and doesn't scale properly.

Now imagine you're Google. You can't read the text in the file either, so the page gets no SEO value.

A well-intentioned file has now excluded multiple audiences - not because of malice or laziness, but because accessibility wasn't considered.

Better outcomes here don't require code - just awareness.

The shift from obligation to intention

It's easy to treat accessibility as a checklist to avoid legal or reputational risk. But if you reframe it as an expression of good communication, everything shifts.

You start writing for the person skimming quickly on a phone, the carer trying to help someone find a service, the person who needs a screen reader to access the form you uploaded, and the stressed-out parent who just wants to understand what your team actually offers.

And when you write for these people, everyone benefits.

This approach transforms accessibility from a compliance burden into a content quality improvement that serves real user needs while supporting business goals like better search performance and increased engagement.

The goal isn't perfection or comprehensive accessibility expertise. It's developing habits that consistently create more usable content for more people, which happens to align with better SEO and user experience outcomes.

Check your understanding

Copy and paste this to ChatGPT when you're ready for feedback:

I've been completing some questions that have been presented to me as part of an SEO course. I'm currently answering questions for a section titled "How accessibility overlaps with good content". Please check my answers and let me know if I've understood the key ideas correctly. My responses are below.

1. A colleague argues that accessibility features like alt text and descriptive headings are "wasted effort" because "most of our users don't have disabilities." In your own words, explain why this reasoning fundamentally misunderstands both accessibility and effective content strategy.

2. Which approach best demonstrates the intersection of accessibility and SEO principles?

Creating detailed image captions that describe visual elements and providing separate alt text that focuses on the image's function or meaning
Writing alt text that includes relevant keywords while also describing the image content for screen reader users
Using descriptive headings that incorporate target keywords and clearly indicate content hierarchy for both users and search engines
Structuring content with clear headings and meaningful link text while ensuring proper color contrast for visual elements

3. Your organisation wants to convert all written content to video format because "people prefer watching to reading." From an accessibility perspective, what are the potential problems with this approach, and how would you recommend balancing multimedia content with inclusive design principles?

4. Consider this scenario: You're redesigning a research participation page that currently has poor accessibility. The page has a 60% bounce rate, ranks poorly in search results, and generates few inquiries despite high traffic. Explain how addressing accessibility issues might solve multiple problems simultaneously, and why an "accessibility-first" approach could be more effective than addressing SEO and user experience separately.