How does digital accessibility increase revenue?

1 Digital accessibility aligns with discovery by modern search engines and LLMs.

Imagine your website without its visual design, fonts, and animation, leaving only default Times New Roman text, static images, and semantic landmarks.

Use of screenshots from The New York Times (opens in new tab) for educational purposes only under fair use.

The flattened, less charismatic version of the website is roughly equivalent to its “accessibility tree,” like a whole-body MRI that exposes the underlying structure no matter what visuals lie cosmetically on the surface. In other words, the accessibility tree is the machine-readable version of your website.

The accessibility tree can liberate information for easy reading by search and stakeholders, but a malformed accessibility tree is a negative signal, repelling both screenreader-using humans and automated crawlers.

When your website is structurally clean and screenreader-friendly, it's automatically more relevant to modern search.

Specific usage by LLMs and search engines vary, but widely-adopted tools like OpenAI Atlas^[1] (ChatGPT) and Playwright MCP^[2] (Microsoft) rely on the accessibility tree to interpret and rank information.

2 Digital accessibility is a competitive advantage for website search.

Semrush, AccessibilityChecker, and BuiltWith ran a study^[3] of 10,000 websites, finding a positive correlation between WCAG 2.2 standards conformance and stronger organic traffic. Additionally, “non-compliant websites are significantly more likely to have poor performance, with many showing little to no organic keywords, traffic, or authority.”

3 Digital accessibility reduces expensive legal exposure.

Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act specifies that accessibility standards apply to web content for U.S. “businesses that are open to the public.”^[4]

In 2025 there were 3,117 lawsuits against websites for failure to meet accessibility standards for assistive technology.^[5]

Additionally, companies that do business in the European Union and exceed the “microenterprise threshold“ must meet even stricter operability standards under EN 301 549.^[6]

4 Digital accessibility broadens user base and client opportunities.

Analytics won't capture interactions by keyboard or assistive technology by default, and without specific data it's impossible to know how many successful or interrupted conversions to your site come from adaptive users. Worse, you'll never know how many analytics bounces are due to an assistive technology user clicking through to your site from search, then bouncing due to an inaccessible interface.

In other words, you're losing an unknown number of conversions that you won't be able to see in analytics.

WCAG accessibility compliance is a table stake for lucrative contracts in:

• Government: Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act requires meeting WCAG 2.2 standards, later reinforced by the 21st Century IDEA Act (2018) Potential contracts: benefits and unemployment portals, brochure-style information systems
• Healthcare: Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act mandates accessibility for digital health tools Potential contracts: online patient portals, telehealth platforms
• Higher education: Title II of the ADA and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act are actively enforced by the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights Potential contracts: course catalogs, learning management systems
• Financial services: banks and credit unions face strict regulatory scrutiny and are lucrative targets for ADA Title III litigation^[7] Potential contracts: banking portals, forms

Neglecting accessibility or misunderstanding it as a “nice-to-have” can disqualify your organization as a potential partner.

Recommended reading on the positive impact accessibility standards have for all users: “Blind people don't visit my website” by Ryan Rietveld.