How accessibility shapes marketing's next chapter

Accessibility is about not shutting people out. It lets more people find you. Most organisations treat accessibility guidelines as a target - the thing you build towards and then tick off. The ones getting real value from it have spotted something the compliance framing misses: build for the person having a harder time than usual, and you've quietly built a better experience for almost everyone else too. You've also, without setting out to, built a page that search engines and AI assistants can read, because they need the same things a person shut out by a bad page needs. That's the opportunity most charities are leaving on the table - not a legal minimum to clear, but a genuine edge for the organisations that treat it as one. 

Picture who is actually arriving at your website today. There's the parent up at 2am with a toddler who won't settle, phone on minimum brightness, one thumb, trying to work out if what they're experiencing is normal. There's the person searching for a bereavement charity at 11pm because that's when grief caught up with them. There's someone on a slow rural connection where a JavaScript-heavy homepage takes eight seconds to load and they've already gone before it finishes. And there's someone stood outside on their phone in bright sun, squinting at low-contrast text they can barely make out. None of these people would describe themselves as disabled. But all of them are one bad page away from leaving. 

Now add the audience for whom that same friction isn't an occasional bad night but a permanent experience of being online at all - people with sight loss, cognitive conditions, reduced dexterity. For them, the barriers above aren't circumstantial. They're constant. 

None of this is an edge case. It is a lot of people, much of the time, arriving in a state your funnel was not modelled for, and every one of them was acquired at a cost. 

The maths nobody states out loud 

Every marketing funnel runs on an unstated assumption: that the person you are targeting can actually use what you're sending them to. Set a target, build a campaign, model the conversion rate and the cost per acquisition - all of it assumes the destination works for the audience you are aiming it at. 

An estimated 16.8 million people in the UK live with a disability - roughly one in four, up by 4.9 million over the past decade. Layer in the situational barriers above - tiredness, poor connectivity, unfamiliar language, small screens in bright light - and the share of any audience navigating some kind of friction on a given visit is considerably larger than that headline figure alone suggests. 

None of this shows up as a distinct line in your reporting. A donor who could not complete a form because of a contrast failure does register - as a drop-off, an exit, an abandoned session. But it looks identical to someone who got distracted, changed their mind, or simply lost interest. Nothing in the dashboard distinguishes ‘could not’ from ‘did not want to’. Every model has, in effect, been built on an audience that was already smaller than it looked, and the gap is invisible precisely because it hides inside numbers that already have a hundred other explanations. 

Two pressures compounding at once 

Two shifts are raising the stakes right now, independently of each other. 

The first is legal. WCAG 2.2 Level AA has been enforceable for UK organisations serving EU users since 28 June 2025, with penalties running into the millions of euros in some member states under the European Accessibility Act. An accessibility statement has moved from a values document to a compliance one. 

The second is AI, and it cuts in a direction most teams have not accounted for yet. AI-generated overviews now answer a large and growing share of searches directly on the results page, and independent studies have repeatedly found that pages triggering one see organic click-through fall sharply - in some analyses by more than half. The content most exposed is exactly the kind many charities have invested years in: informational content explaining conditions, services, and how to get help. Being well-structured will not keep that content out of an AI Overview - if anything, it makes citation more likely. What it changes is whether you're the source the AI Overview credits or one it absorbs without attribution. The same studies that measured the overall decline also found that brands cited inside an AI Overview get substantially more clicks than uncited ones answering the same query. Structuring content so it's legible to both people and machines - the discipline now called GEO, generative engine optimisation - is the difference between disappearing into an answer and being named as its source. 

There is a sharper twist here worth naming. The 2026 WebAIM Million analysis - which scores the accessibility of the top one million home pages - found that pages relying more heavily on AI-assisted code generation showed more accessibility errors on average, not fewer. AI tools can draft image descriptions and flag structural issues, but they can't make the editorial judgement about whether a description captures an image's purpose, or whether a page structure serves someone navigating without a mouse. Used without oversight, AI is making the problem worse, not solving it. 

The overlap almost nobody considers 

Here's the reframe worth sitting with: the web already forced everyone to build for a user who cannot see the page, cannot use a mouse, and only understands clean structure. It is called Googlebot, and it has been the web's most demanding accessibility tester for two decades. Semantic headings, descriptive links, logical content order, meaningful alt text – that is SEO fundamentals. It's also accessibility fundamentals. Both disciplines are answering the same question: can this be understood by someone who isn't experiencing the page the way a sighted, mouse-using visitor is? 

The gap between where most sites sit and where they need to be is significant. That same WebAIM analysis found that 95.9% of the top one million home pages had at least one detectable accessibility failure, with the average number of errors on a page sitting at 56. Closing that gap has a measurable upside: a recent SEMrush study of 10,000 websites found that WCAG-compliant sites saw 23% more organic traffic and ranked for 27% more keywords than non-compliant sites - and the gap is widening as AI-driven search rewards the same clean, well-structured content that accessibility requires. Accessibility work is rarely budgeted as an SEO investment. Increasingly, it should be treated as one. 

Meeting the standard is not the same as welcoming someone in 

It is worth being precise about what WCAG conformance actually gets you. The standard defines the minimum required to stop actively excluding someone - it says nothing about whether the experience is any good once they're in. A page can clear every automated check and still be the kind of page nobody enjoys using. Compliance is the floor, not the destination. 

The organisations that get more from accessibility work are the ones that treat the standard as a starting point rather than a finish line. This has happened before in the physical world. Kerb cuts, the dropped edges at road crossings, were built for wheelchair users. Everyone uses them now - parents with pushchairs, delivery drivers, anyone dragging luggage through a town centre. Captions were built for deaf viewers. Most social video is now watched on mute, on trains, in offices, next to people who don't want sound coming from someone else's phone. In both cases, a change made for the person who needed it most became something the whole audience benefited from. That is the difference between avoiding exclusion and welcoming people in - and it's available to any organisation willing to look past the compliance checklist to the experience underneath it. 

A five-minute test 

Pick an important page on your site - a donation form, a service finder, an event sign-up. Try to reach it and complete it using only a keyboard, no mouse, tabbing through every element. If you make it all the way through, that is a good sign. If you do not, you have just experienced a share of your audience experiences every time they try to engage with your cause. 

Accessibility earns its place in the brief from the start - sitting alongside brand guidelines and tone of voice, with the same weight - rather than as a check applied at the end. That's what stops an organisation running this project again in three years. If a conversation about where your platform stands today would be useful, we'd be glad to talk through what an audit could surface for your site.