Accessibility
Does accessibility help SEO?
Yes, because a screen reader and a crawler read the same signals: heading hierarchy, link text, alt attributes, semantic elements, and whether content exists in the HTML at all. Accessibility is not a ranking factor by name, but most of its requirements are things search engines independently reward.
Where they overlap directly
- Descriptive link text — required for screen reader link navigation, and how a crawler understands the destination
- Heading structure — how both build a mental model of the page
- Alt text — how a screen reader describes an image and how image search indexes it
- Semantic HTML — how both distinguish navigation from content
- Content present without JavaScript — the same requirement for both
Where they diverge
Colour contrast, focus indicators and touch target size matter enormously to users and not at all to a crawler. Do them anyway — they affect whether visitors convert, which is the thing rankings were supposed to produce.
The practical consequence
A page where every link says "read more" is unusable by link navigation and simultaneously tells a search engine nothing. One edit fixes both. This is a rare case where the right thing and the profitable thing are the same change.
The longer version
This answer is deliberately short. If you want the full treatment, Website accessibility, without the compliance theatre covers it in about 5 minutes — free, ungated, written from client work.
Who answered this
Anas Bin Masud builds e-commerce sites and does technical SEO for businesses in the UK, Canada and Pakistan — fifteen live client sites, six of them stores taking real payments. These answers come from those projects rather than from a content brief. More about how I work, or ask me something directly.