AI for Accessibility: Smarter Websites Still Need Human Standards

AI is changing everything it seems. Will website accessibility be any different? In the olden days (read: a year ago), a manual review of your website would have taken the team days to complete, and now the same review can be completed in hours. AI tools can analyze your content, identify issues, and recommend accessibility improvements on thousands of pages. For organizations with massive websites, this is a significant savings of time and money. And regular reviews become faster and easier to incorporate into ongoing website maintenance.

And yet AI for accessibility has its limitations because the fundamental goal of accessibility is not about making software happy but ensuring that every visitor—including those with visual, hearing, motor, and cognitive disabilities—can successfully use your website. To reach this goal, we must have some empathy, context, and judgment, qualities that remain uniquely human.

So, we are seeing that the greatest success in this area is enjoyed by organizations that are not replacing their accessibility experts with AI but are giving those experts better tools, which allow them to spend less time finding accessibility problems and more time solving them.

AI Is an Excellent Accessibility Assistant

AI is good at identifying technical accessibility problems that historically have taken large amounts of development and quality assurance time. Modern tools can now review entire websites and identify alternative text that is missing, uncover heading structure issues, recognize unlabeled form controls, expose color contrast problems, and many other potential WCAG violations.

And so the team can, instead of manually inspecting every page, focus on inspecting the AI results, addressing more complex issues, and work on improving the overall user experience. Basically, AI can perform the labor-intensive work, and the accessibility team can concentrate on the decisions that require years of expertise.

And as an additional benefit, these reviews no longer have to occur only before a website launches. Accessibility testing can now become a part of the normal website publishing and development process, and issues can be addressed continually as content and features are added and changed.

Accessibility Is More Than Passing Automated Tests

Automated testing, even with its power, has limitations. Many accessibility issues cannot be identified by AI software because they depend on understanding meaning rather than simply detecting code.

For example, an image on a healthcare website shows a doctor comforting an anxious patient. AI might generate the alt text: “A doctor is standing next to a patient.” While this is technically true, it misses the intended purpose of the picture. A human will understand that this image is trying to communicate compassion and reassurance. Having these words as the alternative text much better reflects the message the organization wants to convey.

The same types of challenges appear throughout the website. An AI tool can successfully verify that headings do indeed exist, but cannot consistently determine whether or not the headings create a logical flow that helps the reader understand the context. AI tools can check off that form labels are present, but they won’t know whether the instructions are clear enough for someone completing an application. They can report that every image on the website includes alt text without being able to recognize when those descriptions are confusing, redundant, or unnecessary.

AI Helps Create Better Structured Content

One of the strengths of AI is its ability to analyze large amounts of content. Most websites have, over the years, accumulated pages created by many different people, which has resulted in inconsistent headings, poorly organized content, weak link text, and duplicate titles that make navigation difficult for both the user and the assistive technologies.

AI can quickly identify these issues across the entire website and give the team prioritized recommendations rather than the team being forced to review hundreds or thousands of pages manually. The content team can then focus on improving the organization and readability of the content instead of spending that time searching for the problems.

The result of this successful marriage between the right AI tool and the expert team is improved accessibility. Better content structure makes your website easier for everyone to navigate, it improves your SEO, empowers AI search, and brings your visitors and your information together quickly and efficiently.

Inclusive Design Requires Human Judgment

The established accessibility standards are an important foundation, but truly inclusive website design goes well beyond technical compliance.

Your website may technically satisfy every accessibility test and yet still frustrate your visitors because the language is confusing, navigation is not intuitive, or important information is difficult to locate. AI is great at recognizing patterns, but it does not experience confusion, uncertainty, or frustration the way people do.

A human team of designers and UX professionals can understand how your users think. They recognize unclear instructions, wonky page layouts, and when those tasks deemed most important require too many steps. Years of experience, observation, and usability testing are needed alongside automated analysis.

Accessibility Is an Ongoing Commitment

One key understanding about accessibility is that it doesn’t end once the initial audit has been conducted. Your website is always changing. New content, new features, new campaigns, and the addition of third-party software introduce new functionality. Each one of these changes has the potential to create new accessibility issues.

AI makes the continuous monitoring that is needed practical by reviewing your website as it grows and changes. It can identify problems long before they affect large portions of your website. Instead of having to conduct major remediation projects every few years, your organization can make small improvements continuously, which reduces costs and maintains a higher quality day to day.

How New Target Helps Boost AI for Accessibility

New Target considers accessibility in every phase of a website’s lifecycle. We use AI to quicken accessibility audits, help identify technical issues, improve the content structure, and support continuous quality assurance. Our accessibility team, UX experts, developers, and content strategists then oversee those findings with human review, thus ensuring that technical compliance indeed translates into genuine usability.

We help organizations meet WCAG and Section 508 requirements while creating digital experiences that are welcoming, effective, and inclusive for every visitor. AL tools make accessibility more efficient to gain and maintain, and human expertise ensures the final outcome. Contact us.