What does your site sound like? Not how it looks in a crawl report. How it sounds, top to bottom, read aloud by a screen reader. Maxwell Ivey can tell you, because that’s how he uses the web. He’s almost totally blind, he’s known as The Blind Blogger, and he consults on digital accessibility through The Accessibility Advantage. On the Unscripted SEO Podcast he walked me through how he actually moves around a page, and almost every pain point he named is something an SEO already owns. You can watch the full episode here or listen on Castos.
The order a screen reader hears your page
A screen reader starts at the top left, reads across to the top right, then drops to the next row and goes across again. It stops at every link, button, labeled image, labeled video and frame, whether Maxwell is moving by tab, by heading or by searching for a string of characters. To reach the actual paragraphs, he combines the arrow keys with heading navigation.
So on most sites, here’s the sequence he gets:
- The logo or banner. Its alt text usually says “logo” or “banner.” Once in a while it says the company name.
- The whole menu. Every item, every time.
- Maybe some content.
- The accessibility button, which, on sites using automated accessibility tools, usually sits “right before the footer.”
That’s the top of the funnel for a screen reader user, and most of it is noise you put there.
Run a 20-minute screen reader audit on your own site
You don’t need a WCAG course to catch the worst of it. Maxwell was clear that the guidelines are general and don’t tell you how a person with a disability actually navigates a particular site. These checks come straight from what he described.
- Unplug the mouse. Tab through your main conversion path, start to finish. Maxwell can sometimes simulate a mouse click, but “quite often that simulation doesn’t work when I need it to work the most, like the last button of a checkout system.”
- Read only your headings. Pull the H1 to H3 outline. If the outline doesn’t tell you what the page offers, a heading-navigating user can’t find it either. Asked to pick one fix, Maxwell picked headings.
- Fix the logo alt text. Brand name plus what you do. It’s the first thing he hears.
- Label every button and link. “Click here” and an unlabeled icon button read as nothing useful.
- Move the accessibility toggle up. If you use a widget, put its button near the top of the page, not just above the footer.
- Split long forms. Several short screens beat one long one, and mobile users benefit most.
- Caption every video. Maxwell cited a study that found 37% of people under 40 won’t watch a video without captions.
Most of that list already overlaps with on-page SEO basics, which is the point.
Headings do double duty
I told Maxwell how I explain headings to clients: the H1 tells Google and the bots what the whole page is about, each subheader says what its section is about, and a short block of text should follow it right away. He took that further. Headings let him “jump over information that is not necessary” and go straight to the part of the page he came for.
“If I were going to pick one of the things we’ve talked about and say, it’s the most important thing, it would be headings.”
Maxwell also believes search engines and AI crawlers grade sites on these accessibility basics, headings, labeled links and buttons, and alt text. Google hasn’t confirmed accessibility as a ranking factor, so I’d call that his opinion, not a measured result. Google does use behavior, though, and I brought that up on the show: Google looks at how people interact with a page and how long they stay on a page. A visitor who can’t find what they came for leaves, disabled or not.
Alt text is a message, not a keyword field
Maxwell knows alt text is a pain. It can’t be embedded in the image file, so a real estate agent who tags 40 listing photos on their site has to write the descriptions again for social media and email. His fix is a template, so you stop deciding from scratch every time.
“So how about we just meet each other halfway and y’all try to use half that 150 characters for descriptive language and half for keywords.”
That 150 to 180 character indexing limit is his working number. Google doesn’t publish one, so I treat it as a sensible length rather than a hard rule. What matters more is the job of the image. “Descriptions are important if the description is the reason for having the image.” If a photo of two people shaking hands only marks a closed deal, a short line about the deal beats a physical description. If the people themselves are the point, describe them. For more on the image side, see 9 tips for image optimization.
Cut what a screen reader has to wade through
His last point was “minimalism, minimalism, minimalism.” Every link in your nav, every decorative image and every homepage block is something a screen reader user has to move past before reaching what you sell. If a page doesn’t need to be in the homepage menu, remove it. If a section doesn’t explain what you do, how or why someone should care, move it off the homepage.
And there’s an upside your competitors are ignoring. Maxwell said people with disabilities will overpay for products delivered accessibly, and they’ll advocate for the brands that make the effort. Some of the biggest companies, with budgets and whole teams, still do this badly. How long would it take you to do it better on your own site?
The full conversation, including the disability tax and a truck sale won by physical buttons, is in the Unscripted SEO recap.