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You are probably using AI more than you did six months ago. Maybe a lot more. Summarizing long reports. Pulling answers out of a private website that only your company or team can access, where you store all your shared knowledge. Drafting copy from old material. It has become part of the workflow.
Here is the thing nobody really talks about, though: AI can only work with what it can actually read. And if your documents and websites are not accessible, there is a lot it just can't see.
The good news? The same things that make content easier for people with disabilities to use also make it easier for AI to understand. You do not have to choose between the two. The work overlaps.
Here are a few places this shows up:
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Headings. When you tag a heading as a real H1 or H2 instead of just making the text big and bold you are giving both screen readers and AI a map of your document. Without that map, everything looks like one long blob.
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Alt text. AI is getting better at "seeing" images, but it still leans on alt text to know what is in them. A chart with the alt text "Q3 revenue grew 30%" tells the story. A chart called "chart_final_v2.png" tells nobody anything.
Buttons that are actually buttons. A real `` and a styled ` ` might look the same on screen, but one is meaningful to a screen reader (and to an AI agent browsing your site), and the other is invisible. The same goes for links, lists, and form fields: use the real thing, not a lookalike.
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PDFs from which text can be selected. If your PDF is a scanned image, AI can't read it. Neither can a screen reader. Therefore, if your archive is full of scanned documents, a big chunk of your team's knowledge is locked away.
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Plain language. Short sentences. Defined acronyms. Consistent terms. This helps everyone: readers with cognitive disabilities, non-native English speakers, busy colleagues, and yes, AI too.
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Captions and transcripts. A video without a transcript is a black box. Add one, and suddenly that webinar, that product demo, that all-hands-on meeting becomes searchable and summarizable.
You can see the pattern. Content that is structured, labeled, and clearly written works better for humans who need accommodations and for the AI tools we are all leaning on.
So next time accessibility comes up in a planning meeting, and someone treats it like a nice-to-have, you have a new angle. It is not just the right thing to do (though it is). It is also what makes everything else you are building, including your AI, work.
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