Accessibility for SEOs: How to take Accessibility into consideration as an SEO

Welcome to a new edition of Crawling Mondays. In today's edition, we're going to talk about a very, very important topic, not only for SEOs but for UX specialists, for the business, for the product, and sometimes unfortunately we tend to overlook it: accessibility. Accessibility for SEOs. And for this very, very important topic, I have invited today 2 SEO specialists who know a lot about this. particular area who are going to share their wisdom and experience with us to highlight those aspects that we should take into consideration. On one hand, I have Ashley Berman Hale. She's the VP of Professional Services at DeepCrawl. Hello, Ashley. How are you?

I am still and always will be in the swing of Halloween spirit. So fantastic.

Thank you. Thank you very much for bringing the Halloween spirit to us. I am disguised as an SEO. What can I say?

However you handle your spooky season is good. We just, we love it all. Right.

Billie, thank you very much for joining today. She's Billie Jean. She's a training lead at SEOWorks where she's also a senior account manager. Hello, Billie.

Hi. I'm also dressed up as an SEO today.

Before starting the conversation, I want to thank Crawling Monday's sponsor today. That is Content King. Content King is the platform that you can use to be alerted whenever something goes wrong with any SEO configuration in real time. Take a look at the link below in the description and start testing Content King. Thank you very much for your sponsorship today. Okay. Let's start with the conversation. We have heard about accessibility whenever we work with designers, UX specialists, even with web developers. But can you please share why accessibility should be something very important for SEOs? I think that we sometimes even use in the SEO world the accessibility term to refer to accessibility for Crawlers, right? Is it accessible for the Googlebot? But we don't necessarily tend to think about accessibility from a user perspective.

Just SEOs in general, the reason why we should care about this is because Google does. In their mission statement on their, like, their own website, it says they want the internet to be accessible for everyone. So instead of us thinking about site speed, accessibility, and being able to appear for people on 3G connections and stuff, it goes so much deeper than that. We want the website, our websites and everything else to be accessible for people that use screen readers. We want it to be accessible for people with ADHD who might not stay on the page as long. We want to keep them on the page, so we need to cater everything that we're doing to them. And us not doing that is just constantly losing our clients, like potential visitors. It could be losing them money. It could just be causing so many issues. And we're also by By not focusing on accessibility, we are gatekeeping our clients' content and sites and businesses. So why aren't we caring about it? It's not just a thing as an SEO to think about and talk about. It's just general human decency as well. Like, why are we making something that somebody can't use? And that's what accessibility is. It's, it's making everything usable for anyone. So limited mobility, visual impairments. A mum carrying 2 children, can they still use your website with 2 babies in their arms? Like these are just real everyday people that might not be able to use your website because it's not designed in a way that does. So we're covering everything from an average desktop site, a mobile site, anything we do needs to factor these people in. And that's it. Why, why as an SEO would we not want people on our sites?

Billie, I love that you said that we're gatekeeping sites. Right. Like that is the right terminology is we're just like straight up closing people out of it. And I usually talk internally or to clients of, you know, yes, it's a good thing to do for humans. If I cannot get you to hop on board with that, it's a good thing to do for Google and people who actually want to buy stuff. So there are about 15% of the world live with a disability that could affect how they get online. And I think that's even a low number because they haven't really studied neurodivergence. And I also love that you brought up ADHD. I'm diagnosed and finally realizing how it totally changes how I navigate. The internet, as well as how I do my job, which is I work for DeepCrawl. We spend a lot of time in data and on the internet. And then if nothing else, we, we push like the lawsuit stuff, right? So depending on where you are, you may have legal culpability if people cannot access your website. So that's a good way to just kind of get in. But for me, it's just, I just wanna confront it, how we talk and think about it as a company, because these disabilities that can hinder access online, we have to appreciate that modern technology and access to information can literally change lives. Like can change the entire trajectory of people's lives and most definitely always affect the quality of their life. Doing this is not just about the bottom line or, you know, making sure that we rank for certain things. Like this is such incredible power that we should wield properly. I think all SEOs have some level of engagement with technical SEO. That's where I like to hang out. But you can make magic happen. Like this is a really incredible spot to be in.

I think that you talk about something very important, right? How Accessibility can come from all sorts of very different aspects of what we cover in SEO. So for example, we think about accessibility in terms of speed, but also in terms of the sizes of the text for people who have impediments when reading. Also, we have seen all this trend, speaking of tech SEO, of frameworks that when implementing navigation, for example, or links or buttons, they are not even actual accessible href tags that are not crawlable and also have issues of being correctly displayed and rendered and are not accessible also to many users in many situations and scenarios. Which would you say that are some of the most common don'ts and challenges and problems that you end up running into again and again?

I was looking at WCAG just to see what the most common failures were. Low contrast, which like, y'all, I get it. Pretty like light gray text on white is— designers love it. Just don't do it. Missing alt text and empty links. Those were the top 3 that were often hit. I'm also going to toss in there unlabeled form fields because that's a conversion point. So just in terms of what that entity as an authority sees as most often missed, just want to toss that out there.

I feel like that's such a no-brainer. Like everyone should have that tags. correct now. But not having that limits zooming in, it changes how it renders on different devices, and that's—

Yeah.

I see that on every other new client I get. It's always the first thing I check, and most of the time they've got it wrong. I don't get how. Like you've said, alt text, that one is a massive one for me. So as an SEO as well, and I bang on about this one all the time, it's not just an accessibility thing. That is Obviously the reason we want to do it, but for those SEOs that need that additional push to actually do it because it's always left until last.

Visual search, I feel like it's like the thing. Well, there's always the thing, right? But sure does feel like a heavy push right now. Gotta get images right.

Even when SEOs take into consideration image optimization, let's say, sometimes the way that the alt description is optimized is not necessarily in a way that is naturally descriptive, let's say. I have seen many scenarios unfortunately that is leveraging To pretty much try to spam rather than actually describing the image in a way that is descriptive, natural for the user. Would you like to share a little bit the steps that you follow to identify these issues? I imagine that you integrate this already when you're doing an SEO audit.

I think it's important to at least try to use your site with a screen reader or to try to turn on like Apple Accessibility or Google Accessibility Tools and go through it. I feel the same way about A/B testing. Like if you stand behind someone and keep your mouth shut and tell them to convert on your site, you'll see Where some of the usability snags are. So I want you to get on the site and actually try to browse it and see if you can complete a task emulating various disabilities. I get the feeling sometimes that we rely on tools so much that like we forget to just go like walk around off Wi-Fi on our phone and use the internet like on sites that we manage. Outside of that, the 2 tools that I probably like the best— well, I'll give one resource. The, the WebAIM WCAG checklist is great because the like WebCon accessibility guidelines, man, they're brilliant. Which means that I have a hard time getting through all the documentation. They're wicked smart folks, but WebAIM does like a checklist that makes it really easy that I can pass around to teams. But when I'm actually going through sites, the WAVE tool from WebAIM, also again, brilliant folks, is really good to just test a page and be able to see what's there. And then DeepCrawl has also used Deque, I think is how you pronounce it, D-E-Q-U-E.com. They have something called Axe. It's their accessibility tools, but they offer an API and a Chrome plugin. And so. It's, it's just really nice to just pop it in. So we've integrated it at times. So when I run a test, like, on a client site, I can drop it in and make a custom call. And then I can get some accessibility issues at scale, which I can never get in other ways. Like, I don't know, Billy, maybe you know some secret sauce. But that's my thing is like being able to say like, you have this many critical errors on 72% of your sites.

So you've just described majority of what I do. Basically. So the first thing I do is set a Sitebulb crawl going because Sitebulb are just like my gods at this point.

They do such good work.

They do. And actually on there, there is now an accessibility option. So it slows down your crawl a little bit, but not, not too bad. And it will do those checks in bulk. So it'll check all the forms, it'll check your color contrast across the site, it'll check a lot of things. So I set that going and then I do all the manual checks while the crawl's going off doing his thing. So I'll go on my mobile, have a go through, go on the desktop, and then I'll go through with a screen reader. By the time I've done that, my crawl hopefully will be done. And then I just check everything using the axe-dev tool. And that's just the best because you run it on the specific page and it'll highlight the area where the issue in the code is. That was literally all I was doing this morning on one of my client sites.

Yes. I think that the axe user impact assessment is also integrated with Lighthouse accessibility scoring. And of course it's page by page. You cannot do it in bulk, but at least it can provide something to start with and to start understanding why and how, like a page-to-page basis. But indeed, Cybook, I love when they started to integrate these additional validations. I love that Deeproll is also doing the same at the more enterprise level. So it's great to see that anybody can have access to these validations at a scale level. Something that I wanted to talk about because you mentioned tools. Are there any particular features from the tools that you find that are like game-changing that you will say to an SEO who are just starting, like, go and take a look at this particular feature or this particular tool to kickstart the process right away and have a better understanding or a particular resource? That you think that can be also useful? Not necessarily only a tool, but also a resource that you think that can shape the way into SEOs to start working more with accessibility?

I'm gonna give another shout out to Sitebulb. I'm sorry. Like everything the tool does is amazing, but I recommend it for all of our new starters, people that we've brought in on entry level to join SEO, kind of. This is where I start their technical SEO journey because Those tools, it'll identify the issues, but it'll also give you all the reasons why that's been flagged and how to resolve it. And it shows everything as a specific example for the site you're on, basically. It's not going to tell you about a problem if it's not a problem for that site. And I find that's such a good starting point. We're also constantly putting out really good resources around accessibility. But it's— so follow her handle, it's Lucy Pickering. She's a really, really talented SEO and you UX person and she's wrote several blog posts, which have been amazing on accessibility and cover things that you don't necessarily think of.

I really like the, the WAVE tool just because I tell someone, just drop your site in there and take a look. They've just done such a really good job with strong UI where they can say what's critical, what's not. Like the way they group that much data is pretty fucking brilliant. And if they can do that and then we can crawl at scale and say like, that was scary, right? Did you know that on like 97% of your pages that are indexable, you also have 13 critical issues? Issues, like something like that. So I find that to be really impactful and people can drop in their own page and actually understand the data. There's so much around accessibility where it's just like really heavy text, but that tool is really lovely.

Amazing. So these are great, definitely great recommendations. I want to start wrapping up with some of those last tips, potentially ideas or recommendations, something that we haven't yet covered. One of the things that I tend to say a lot to my clients is that if SEO is well done, at this point, 99% of the time our efforts should be aligned with accessibility best practices and UX best practices too. And something that I have started to do much more, not only with clients but also with my own projects, is to record user sessions using sometimes even free tools, for example, Clarity from Microsoft. And then of course, whenever we do how it's disabling all JavaScript, all images, and see what we see out there. Sometimes this is where I have realized that some images have some terrible alt descriptions. All of a sudden it's like, take a look at that image has nothing to do with this crap here. Oh, all of a sudden we don't see these buttons at all. Interesting. They were not implemented as href tags in the first place, or maybe they were, but they were empty.

Lots of those, lots of empty ones. Oh gosh.

It was not taxing then.

I love that you just talked about how the screen looks so different. I had this thought, I'm like, what if 100 people sent me what they see? Like take a screenshot of my site on your mobile device. And what does that look like to you? I know that that's like kind of junk data and, and not at scale, but I just get so curious about how it looks through other people's eyes. I hadn't quite thought about how to do that, but yeah, I, I mean, maybe not the most scalable tip, but watch people use your stuff and just try to keep your mouth shut, which is like the hardest thing anyone's ever asked me to do, cuz the more assumptions I make about users, usually the more wrong I am.

So this is less technical. This is more about presenting the data and also referring to people that need these to make the sites more accessible, is to just use people-first language and always think people first as well. And I find having that language and having that understanding of what people actually care about as well has helped me speak to developers about it. It's helped me actually connect. One of my clients is a massive autism support charity here in the UK, and they taught me where possible, if I'm making something for a user who has autism and learning disabilities, to create resources that actually help them. So in my articles, where I can, I'll do something specific to people that are around them, and I'll try to make easy read guides and things like that to just Give them extra support. Accessibility is not just about tech. It's our content. It's our digital PR. It's our link building. It trickles into everything we're doing. We want everything to be accessible, basically.

I'm the mama of a newly diagnosed autism child or on the spectrum. So what you're saying is, I don't know, you just opened and connected new doors for me that I haven't thought about. I still have a lot to think about right now and process and put it all together. If I could do the 2-sentence— no, it's going to be 4-sentence rambling that I threatened at the beginning. of the call is that beyond just how folks are using your site and maybe have like cognitive or dexterity or sight or hearing, I think of accessibility in a few other ways. Part of it is cost and like the, the heft of data. WebsiteTest.org, I think, does a good job of giving you some dollar signs and just saying, whew, that's a chunky boy there that someone had to load because not everyone in the world has access to affordable data, which means they are blocked from your basic content. I also think accessibility Can be just humanly accessible in that. Does your site show something I can relate to? Like, I want to see me. I want to see pictures of people who look like me or who may live in my communities. I want to see real humans. I want to see some language that I can read and identify with. And this will be different for each site knowing their customers. But so for example, a plus-size woman, I can't buy from stores that are only showing me thin women. Like, show me what I would look like in the clothes. Like, Make me feel good about women standing there looking fucking awesome and feeling it. So there's that level of accessibility too, is how are you thinking about and making your site and services even just that emotional access that we don't always tap into so that I feel that likeness because familiarity breeds that likeness, which makes me want to spend more money. I have dropped, I don't even like fashion. I've dropped a pretty penny for body positive sites because I'm like, yes, thank you. I would like to see thick thighs walking down that street looking fantastic. That's just one area where I think we can use these same principles Amazing.

I love that you are sharing this wider concept of accessibility because I have totally been there in the past. For example, with my name, my last name Solis, it has an accent, which I have pretty much accepted at this point that I don't use as much with the accent anymore because of how it is displayed in many websites because they don't support names necessarily that have accents. And that makes them, let's say, not so friendly or accessible to everybody. So that's so cool that you're sharing this. many levels and layers into this. So thank you. Thank you very much for bringing that up. And thank you for also potentially and very hopefully opening the eyes of many who are watching today. Very looking forward to see how you start implementing and integrating these principles and validations much more into your SEO processes to make the sites friendlier and much more welcoming and better converting sites at the end of the day, which is also a little bit of our goal across many more different types of audiences. So thank you. Thank you very much, Ashley, Billy. It has been amazing to have the chance to talk with you today. And of course, if you like this episode, remember to like the episode, to subscribe to the channel. If you want to learn more about this particular topic, follow them. They are super knowledgeable and they love to share over social media and over Twitter. Here you can see their handles here. And hopefully see you in the next episode of Rolling Mondays.

Bye-bye. Bye.