**An accessible page can be used by everyone — including people who rely on screen readers, keyboards or high contrast.** This check looks at accessibility basics: image alt text, form labels, colour contrast, a logical heading structure, and keyboard usability. Beyond being the right thing to do (and often a legal requirement), accessible markup tends to be the clean, semantic HTML that search and AI engines parse best.
It checks a set of foundational accessibility signals that affect a wide range of users. Specifically:
- Alt text — images have descriptive alternative text for screen-reader users.
- Form labels — inputs have associated labels so their purpose is clear.
- Colour contrast — text has sufficient contrast against its background to be readable.
- Headings & landmarks — a logical heading structure and semantic landmarks for navigation.
- Keyboard use — interactive elements are reachable and operable by keyboard.
Strong on the basics passes; some issues is a warning; significant accessibility barriers is a fail.
GEObubbly checks the page against core accessibility basics like alt text, labels, contrast and heading structure. It's a core, scored Security & HTML Quality check that runs directly against the page's markup.
Accessibility means building pages that everyone can use, including people who navigate with a screen reader, use a keyboard instead of a mouse, or need high contrast and larger text. The basics — descriptive alt text on images, labels on form fields, sufficient colour contrast, a logical heading structure, and keyboard-operable controls — cover a large share of real-world barriers. There are three reasons this belongs in an SEO/GEO audit. First, it's the right thing to do and, in many jurisdictions, a legal requirement. Second, accessible markup overlaps heavily with the clean, semantic HTML that engines parse best: alt text gives engines image context, a proper heading hierarchy describes structure, and semantic landmarks help both assistive tech and crawlers understand the page. Third, accessible pages tend to be better-built pages overall, which correlates with the quality signals engines reward. For GEO, the same structure that helps a screen reader extract meaning helps an AI engine extract and cite content.
The foundational accessibility basics include: descriptive alt text on images so screen-reader users know what they show; labels on form fields so their purpose is clear; sufficient colour contrast between text and background for readability; a logical heading structure (one H1, nested H2s and H3s) that conveys the page's outline; semantic landmarks like header, nav and main for orientation; and ensuring all interactive elements can be reached and operated with a keyboard. These cover a large share of real-world barriers and are the starting point of the WCAG guidelines that define accessible web content.
In many jurisdictions, yes — accessibility is a legal obligation for various organisations, often referencing the WCAG standard, and the scope and enforcement vary by country and sector. Beyond legal exposure, inaccessible sites exclude a significant portion of potential users, including people with visual, motor, auditory or cognitive disabilities. Because requirements differ and evolve, it's worth understanding the rules that apply to your organisation, but the practical takeaway is consistent everywhere: building to accessibility basics both reduces legal risk and ensures more people can actually use your site.
Yes, because accessible practices overlap strongly with good SEO. Alt text gives search engines context about images, a logical heading structure helps engines understand your content's outline, semantic HTML and landmarks clarify page structure, and descriptive link text helps both assistive tech and crawlers. Accessible pages also tend to be cleaner, faster and better-structured overall, which aligns with the quality signals engines reward. Accessibility isn't a separate ranking factor you toggle on, but building accessibly naturally produces the clean, well-structured, parseable pages that perform well in search.
Closely — they reinforce each other. Accessible pages rely on semantic, well-structured HTML: real heading elements in a logical order, proper landmarks, labelled controls, and meaningful alt text. That's exactly the kind of clean markup that engines parse most reliably, because the structure carries meaning rather than being faked with styling. When you build for assistive technologies — which interpret the page through its underlying markup — you're building the same clarity that crawlers and AI engines benefit from. Clean HTML and accessibility are two views of the same well-constructed page.
Yes. The structure that makes a page accessible — descriptive alt text, a logical heading hierarchy, semantic landmarks, clear labels — also makes it easier for AI engines to extract and understand your content. A screen reader and an AI crawler both rely on the underlying markup to interpret meaning, so the clarity that serves one serves the other. Well-structured, accessible content is easier to chunk, attribute and cite. Building accessibly therefore supports GEO as a by-product of making your page understandable to any agent that reads it through its markup.