To Build for Accessibility is to Build for Search Engines

Many web design best practices overlap with those of SEO. The reason is simple: such practices as separating style from content, minimizing obtrusive JavaScript, and streamlining code allow search engines to more easily spider, index, and rank web pages.

The goal of accessibility is to make web content accessible to as many people as possible, including those who experience that content under technical, physical, or other constraints. It may be useful to think of search engines as users with substantial constraints: they can’t read text in images, can’t interpret JavaScript or applets, and can’t “view” many other kinds of multimedia content. These are the types of problems that accessibility is supposed to solve in the first place.

Blog post adapted from A List Apart

You may want to visit the W3Cs Web Content Accessibility Guidelines to check your site for accessibility and search engine friendliness.

Another resource is the Google Information for Webmasters page.

Is your site accessible?