You might feel like web accessibility is a list of constraints (limiting cool animations and navigation effects), but personally it allows me to not start with a blank page. When I’m doing something creative, I need instructions or boundaries to have a framework to work within. Why not consider accessibility guidelines as such? It embeds accessibility into your design from the very beginning. In this article, I want to share some quick wins of accessibility best practices that also happen to benefit your website’s ranking with search engines like Google or Bing – i.e. your SEO (Search Engine Optimisation).
Good heading structure helps clarify content
Heading structure is probably one of the most important things to get right – not just for accessibility, but for your website in general, the user experience (UX) and its SEO. It helps visitors who use a screen reader better navigate your site, jumping between sections, understand how content is related to each other. And you know what? It helps everyone. Headings and subheadings create order and logical structure – for real users, but also for crawlers (those bots that scan your webpages to see if they should appear on Google).
But what is a good structure? Start with Heading 1 (H1) for your page title (there should be only one per page). Then use Heading 2 (H2) for section headings, and Heading 3 for anything nested beneath those. It may seem overly simple, but even if it is tempting to reach for H4 instead of H2 because it looks better visually, don’t. Just don’t. Crawlers aren’t humans. They need logical structure to understand how the content of your page is grouped and how sections relate to each other. Style is not a good enough reason to break your heading hierarchy.
Alt-text is not just for screen readers
Alt-text is the description that you attach to an image on your site. It describes the image for people who can’t see it. It probably sounds like a very small percentage of your visitors might need it, right? Well, not really. If images don’t load properly, the alt-text appears in their place, so your visitors still understand what the image they can’t see was about. Alt-text also helps crawlers understand what’s on your website, since they can’t read images the way humans do.
Purely decorative images should have an empty alt attribute (alt=””), so screen readers skip over them. Meaningful images (anything that carries information) should have a clear, descriptive alt-text. A website where all meaningful images are properly described will be better understood by crawlers, and will have a better chance of appearing in search results.
Labelling icons for clarity
Similarly to alt-text, adding a short, simple label to your icon or pictogram benefits everyone. Icons are good visual anchors for visitors, they can also be used consistently across your website, help create meaning, and be part of building recognition of your brand. But, remember that they are not always universal and one icon can have many meanings. Think about a cogwheel – it is often used to represent “settings”, but it can also be “strategy”, “productivity”, “teamwork”, “problem-solving” or maybe even literally the piece of a machine. Some symbols also change or become outdated – young people may not know what the disk icon for “Save” actually mean, or why the symbol for call is this weird shape 📞.
A text label removes the ambiguity. The icon becomes decorative, and that’s fine. Your content becomes clearer, your site becomes more accessible, and since crawlers read text far more reliably than icons or images, you’re giving them more meaningful content to work with.
Animations: a double-edge sword
Animations can add personality to your site and help increase engagement from your visitors. I love browsing experimental or designers’ sites with all their special effects, it’s genuinely fun. But I often end up paying no attention to the actual content.
Poorly built animations can make your site inaccessible in many ways: they can break the layout, not work properly on mobile, hide content, or slow the page down so much that visitors give up and leave. All of this affects your SEO. Page speed is a direct ranking factor for Google, and a slow site ranks lower. If animations are hiding content from crawlers, that content simply might not be indexed at all. Use them intentionally, and always test how your site performs with them running.
Write descriptive link text
This one is easy to overlook. When you add a link in your content, the text you use to anchor it matters – both for accessibility and for SEO. “Click here” or “read more” tells neither your visitor nor a crawler what they’re about to find. “Read our 2024 impact report” or “learn about our services” is immediately meaningful, and it gives search engines useful context about the destination page.
Screen reader users frequently navigate a page by jumping between links, so “click here” repeated five times is genuinely confusing. Descriptive link text is one of the smallest, fastest fixes you can make – and it has a real effect.
Accessibility and SEO: pointing in the same direction
These five quick wins barely scratch the surface of web accessibility, but they illustrate something worth remembering: accessibility and good SEO are not in tension. They reward the same things: clear structure, meaningful content, and a site that works well for everyone, whether that’s a screen reader user, a visitor on a slow connection, or a bot deciding whether your page deserves to appear in search results.
Embedding accessibly from the start shouldn’t be seen as a constraint, but as the basis of good design. If you’d like your website built with accessibility in mind from the start, have a look at how I approach web design.